Aristotle's Four Causes
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- 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
Boris Hennig
Aristotle’s Four Causes
PETER LANG
New York • Bern • Berlin
Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hennig, Boris, author.
Title: Aristotle’s four causes / Boris Hennig.
Description: 1 [edition]. | New York: Peter Lang, 2019.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018042606 | ISBN 978-1-4331-5929-9 (hardback: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4331-5930-5 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-5931-2 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-4331-5932-9 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Aristotle. | Causation.
Classification: LCC B491.C3 H46 2019 | DDC 122—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042606
DOI 10.3726/b14400
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.
© 2019 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York
29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006
All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.
About the book
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.
This eBook can be cited
This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
It is usually assumed that when Aristotle distinguishes between the four causes the student of nature should look for, he is referring to (1) the matter of a thing, (2) its form, (3) that which initiates its coming to be, and (4) its purpose. On this basis, it must remain obscure what the four have in common such that all and only the four of them should be called causes. In what sense do the form or the purpose of a thing cause this thing? What is the effect of matter or form? And why should there be exactly four causes? For instance, why is not the weight of a thing a fifth kind of cause? If the reason is that in a wider sense of “form,” the weight of a thing is one of its forms, why should the material constitution of a thing not also qualify as one of its forms? On the other hand, many properties of a thing appear to be reducible to its purely material features. Could we perhaps reduce all of them? It seems that we might either do without material causes or without formal causes. Further, the final cause does not appear to belong in a list of causes that all natural things must have. In large areas of modern science, we do not any longer refer to purposes, and where we still do so we try not to.
When Aristotle presents his distinction of four causes, he does so without arguing for it. It has therefore been said that we “do not know how Aristotle arrived at the doctrine of the four causes” (Ross 1936, p. 37). Yet, as Stein←15 | 16→ (2011, p. 131) points out, there must be some unity among Aristotle’s causes. Otherwise, he would not be able to distinguish genuine causes from mere chance and luck (tukhē, automaton). In this chapter, I argue that there is in fact a fairly simple rationale for Aristotle’s scheme. This rationale explains his division; it need not reflect the way in which he arrived at it. I show that Aristotle’s fourfold distinction of causes naturally arises from the combination of two distinctions that apply to all natural phenomena. First, concerning any natural process, one may distinguish between the thing that undergoes it and the process itself. Second, one may ask out of what a natural thing comes to be what it is, and one may ask out of what a natural process comes to occur as it does. Conversely, one may ask what a natural thing comes to be as a result of its natural development, and into what a natural process typically unfolds when it occurs. I maintain that within the cross classification that results from combining these two distinctions, the so-called material cause occupies the slot for that out of which a thing comes to be as a result of its natural development, and the formal cause is what it naturally comes to be. Likewise, one can explain what efficient and final causes are by distinguishing between that out of which a natural process comes to be and what it typically comes to be.
Let me begin by clarifying what it is for a process to be natural. Aristotle writes that a thing is natural if it has in itself a principle of motion and rest (Physics II 1 192b13–16). He also tells us that in one sense, the typical development (genesis) of a natural thing may be called its nature (phusis, 193b12–13). A process should accordingly be natural, first, if the thing that undergoes this process has in itself a principle that governs this process. Second, a natural process should be typical—that is, natural—for the thing that undergoes it.
Aristotle also says, misleadingly, that natural things differ from artefacts in that they have an innate impulse to change (hormē, 192b18–19).1 This seems to imply that a process is natural to the extent to which the changing thing is or contains that which initiates the process. But as becomes clear in Physics VIII 4, that a natural thing possesses an internal principle of motion need not mean that it initiates this motion. The principle may merely govern the way in which it is affected by the impact of other things (254b20–22; 255b30–31). Therefore, a process may very well be natural for a thing even if←16 | 17→ the relevant causal chains (in the modern sense of “cause”) begin outside this thing (Wieland 1992, p. 234).
Details
- Pages
- X, 280
- Publication Year
- 2019
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433159299
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433159305
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433159312
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9781433159329
- DOI
- 10.3726/b14400
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2019 (January)
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2019. X, 280 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
Biographical notes
Boris Hennig (Author)
Boris Hennig is Associate Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Ryerson University in Toronto. He earned his PhD from Universität Leipzig. His research focuses on metaphysics, logic, and epistemology.
