Aristotle's four causes are a way to answer "why" questions about something that exists or changes in nature:
- Material cause: The material from which something is made
- Formal cause: The structure or design of something
- Efficient cause: The primary starting point for change or rest
- Final cause: The end or goal of something
Aristotle believed that these four causes could be used to analyze both artificial and natural things. For example, a table's causes are:
- Material: Made of wood
- Formal: Designed with four legs of equal length
- Efficient: Made by a carpenter
- Final: Intended to support objects
Aristotle believed that his four causes were a general analytical scheme that could be applied to a wide range of situations. He believed that his predecessors lacked a complete understanding of causality and that their investigations were not entirely successful.
Responding to Marie-Louise von Franz's Concerns
...and Emptiness Matters as an explanation for Karl Marx's Commodity Fetishism under the "System of Capitalism" (consumer blindness to the commodities "efficient cause" and making it the focus).
2 comments:
https://dai.ly/x6k9yl5 Ever watched Aristotle's Lagoon
Thanks for the backlink, BTW :-))
That's a great find. It's a step "back in time" for me to Foucault's "Archeology of Knowledge" which begins with Madness of Civilizations at the end of the Middle Ages and discovers the "medical gaze" in "The Birth of the Clinic"...
...and my pleasure (and coonvenience) in the back-link. I have found inspiration in many of your posts.
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