Aristotle's Four Causes
Boris Hennig
This book examines Aristotle’s four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final), offering a systematic discussion of the relation between form and matter, causation, taxonomy, and teleology. The overall aim is to show that the four causes form a system, so that the form of a natural thing relates to its matter as the final cause of a natural process relates to its efficient cause. Aristotle’s Four Causes reaches two novel and distinctive conclusions. The first is that the formal cause or essence of a natural thing is not a property of this thing but a generic natural thing. The second is that the final cause of a process is not its purpose but the course that processes of its kind typically take.
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- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2019. X, 280 pp.
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Causes and Becauses
- Things to Keep in Mind
- The Introductory Chapters Introduced
- The Causes in More Detail
- Chapter 1. Aristotle’s Four Causes
- 1.1 Natural Processes
- 1.2 That Out of Which the Thing Comes to Be
- 1.3 What the Thing Comes to Be
- 1.4 Whence the Process Comes to Occur
- 1.5 What the Process Turns Into
- 1.6 Conclusion
- Chapter 2. Two Epistemic Directions of Fit
- 2.1 Archetypes and Ectypes
- 2.2 How to Talk
- 2.3 Sellarsian Sentences
- 2.4 Affection and Function
- 2.5 A Priori Knowledge
- 2.6 Aristotle’s Four Causes
- Chapter 3. Tode, Ti, Toionde
- 3.1 What Is Matter?
- 3.2 The Pale and the Dead Socrates
- 3.3 On Denuding
- 3.4 Tode Ti
- 3.5 The Timaeus
- 3.6 Conclusion
- Chapter 4. The Inseparability of Matter
- 4.1 Matter as Attribute
- 4.2 Matter as Subject
- 4.3 Matter as Potential
- 4.4 Sameness and Difference of Thing and Matter
- 4.5 Alteration vs. Completion
- 4.6 A Note on Material Constitution
- Chapter 5. Types and Classes
- 5.1 Sets and Classes
- 5.2 Polytypic Classes and Clusters
- 5.3 The Type Specimen Method
- 5.4 Two Species Concepts
- 5.5 Standards of Typicality
- 5.6 Conclusion
- Chapter 6. Essences vs. Properties
- 6.1 One Property to Rule Them All
- 6.2 Essence and Explanation
- 6.3 Essences, Properties, and Essential Properties
- 6.4 Sortals and Natural Kinds
- 6.5 Identifying, Classifying, Describing
- 6.6 Another Take on Metaphysics Ζ 13
- Chapter 7. Causation
- 7.1 Causation as a Relation
- 7.2 Hume’s Argument
- 7.3 Water and Suffocation
- 7.4 Three Objections and Replies
- 7.5 Dispositionalism
- 7.6 Conclusion
- Chapter 8. Causal Processes
- 8.1 Causal Processes
- 8.2 “Cause” as a Dimension Word
- 8.3 Aronson’s Formula
- 8.4 A Note on Diagrams
- 8.5 Types and Handles
- 8.6 Conclusion
- Chapter 9. Basic and Derived Final Causes
- 9.1 Final Causes as Limits
- 9.2 The Typical and the Best
- 9.3 Remote Final Causes
- 9.4 External Final Causes
- 9.5 An Example
- 9.6 Reducing Final Causes
- Chapter 10. Teleological Reasoning
- 10.1 The Action as Conclusion
- 10.2 Inference Rules
- 10.3 Mirroring Speculative Reasoning
- 10.4 Natural Teleology
- 10.5 Functions
- 10.6 Conclusion
- Conclusion
- The Material Cause
- Essences
- The Formal Cause
- The Efficient Cause
- The Final Cause
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
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Extract
Causes and Becauses
Aristotle says that in order to really understand a thing, we need to understand its aitiai, and he distinguishes between four kinds of aitia. This term, aitia, is usually translated as “cause”. However, not all of Aristotle’s four aitiai are causes in the modern sense of this word. Perhaps none of them are. There may well be no better translation, but if one uses “cause,” some explanation should be added as to what this word is supposed to mean in this context. A common way of doing so is to give an example like the following.
Take an artefact, such as a silver cup. The material cause of the cup is the silver it is made of. Its formal cause is the shape into which the silver was brought when the cup was made. The efficient cause of the cup is the person who made it (or, perhaps, her capacity of making it). Its final cause is the purpose for which it was made, which is presumably the purpose that its maker had in mind.1
This way of explaining Aristotle’s four causes is misleading in several respects (Sprague 1968). To begin with, it explains all of the causes by using a single example, which Aristotle never does. Further, this single example is an artefact, and although Aristotle refers to artefacts in many of his examples, they are not the ultimate targets of his distinction of causes (cf. Sedley 2010,...
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Or login to access all content.- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Causes and Becauses
- Things to Keep in Mind
- The Introductory Chapters Introduced
- The Causes in More Detail
- Chapter 1. Aristotle’s Four Causes
- 1.1 Natural Processes
- 1.2 That Out of Which the Thing Comes to Be
- 1.3 What the Thing Comes to Be
- 1.4 Whence the Process Comes to Occur
- 1.5 What the Process Turns Into
- 1.6 Conclusion
- Chapter 2. Two Epistemic Directions of Fit
- 2.1 Archetypes and Ectypes
- 2.2 How to Talk
- 2.3 Sellarsian Sentences
- 2.4 Affection and Function
- 2.5 A Priori Knowledge
- 2.6 Aristotle’s Four Causes
- Chapter 3. Tode, Ti, Toionde
- 3.1 What Is Matter?
- 3.2 The Pale and the Dead Socrates
- 3.3 On Denuding
- 3.4 Tode Ti
- 3.5 The Timaeus
- 3.6 Conclusion
- Chapter 4. The Inseparability of Matter
- 4.1 Matter as Attribute
- 4.2 Matter as Subject
- 4.3 Matter as Potential
- 4.4 Sameness and Difference of Thing and Matter
- 4.5 Alteration vs. Completion
- 4.6 A Note on Material Constitution
- Chapter 5. Types and Classes
- 5.1 Sets and Classes
- 5.2 Polytypic Classes and Clusters
- 5.3 The Type Specimen Method
- 5.4 Two Species Concepts
- 5.5 Standards of Typicality
- 5.6 Conclusion
- Chapter 6. Essences vs. Properties
- 6.1 One Property to Rule Them All
- 6.2 Essence and Explanation
- 6.3 Essences, Properties, and Essential Properties
- 6.4 Sortals and Natural Kinds
- 6.5 Identifying, Classifying, Describing
- 6.6 Another Take on Metaphysics Ζ 13
- Chapter 7. Causation
- 7.1 Causation as a Relation
- 7.2 Hume’s Argument
- 7.3 Water and Suffocation
- 7.4 Three Objections and Replies
- 7.5 Dispositionalism
- 7.6 Conclusion
- Chapter 8. Causal Processes
- 8.1 Causal Processes
- 8.2 “Cause” as a Dimension Word
- 8.3 Aronson’s Formula
- 8.4 A Note on Diagrams
- 8.5 Types and Handles
- 8.6 Conclusion
- Chapter 9. Basic and Derived Final Causes
- 9.1 Final Causes as Limits
- 9.2 The Typical and the Best
- 9.3 Remote Final Causes
- 9.4 External Final Causes
- 9.5 An Example
- 9.6 Reducing Final Causes
- Chapter 10. Teleological Reasoning
- 10.1 The Action as Conclusion
- 10.2 Inference Rules
- 10.3 Mirroring Speculative Reasoning
- 10.4 Natural Teleology
- 10.5 Functions
- 10.6 Conclusion
- Conclusion
- The Material Cause
- Essences
- The Formal Cause
- The Efficient Cause
- The Final Cause
- Bibliography
- Index