Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book Alpha Overview

 

 

According to Aristotle, there are four types of causes which all work together:

 

1. Formal Cause: It is the essence of a thing which makes it the type of thing that it is. It can also refer to the whole of the thing or its form. The form is the act which gives it its shape and identity while the matter is the potency which the thing is made out of.

2. Material Cause: The matter a thing is made out of. He criticized earlier philosophers like Thales and Heraclitus for limiting their explanations to only a material cause such as water and fire respectively. Relying solely on a material cause does not explain why or how something is the way it is.

3. Efficient Cause: What brings something into existence or produces it. A substrate itself does not cause itself to change or motion. There cannot be an infinite regress of efficient causes therefore there must be a prime mover or uncaused cause, God. Some poets like Hesiod believed that love was the cause which orders things but Aristotle believes that this explanation, like many others give, avoids the final cause.

4. Final Cause: The purpose of a thing or its telos. It is the motivator of all the other causes.

 

Imagine a bronze statue: its material cause is bronze, its formal cause is its shape that allows one to identify it as a statue which gives it its statue-ness, the efficient cause is the sculptor that made it, and its final cause is perhaps love for making art or it was commissioned for money.

Plato, according to Aristotle, only focused on the formal cause and the material cause. The Platonic forms are the formal cause for the phenomena while The One is the formal cause of the forms which can also be called the Form of the Good. While things in the material world are in constant flux, the forms are ideal, static, definitional, and noumenal. Material things participate in the forms. All humans are participating in the universal of human-ness which exists in a metaphysical realm that is accessible only through intellectual reasoning and philosophical inquiry. However, we are mere imitations of the forms. Aristotle, a former student of Plato, brought up many objections to this theory. Firstly, there are seemingly no limits to the number of possible forms such that it seems implausible and complicated to be a theory that provides a good metaphysical explanation of the world. Secondly, there is no way of knowing whether the material object and the form are correlated. There must be a 3rd man to tell us but this thing can neither be material or a form. But how do we know the relationship between the 3rd man and the form and the material object, there must be a fourth. This will go on ad infinitum. Thirdly, things could participate in multiple forms at the same time which can lead to problems. Fourthly, it is unclear how the forms are a cause for the material things. Fifthly, it is not pragmatic, a shoemaker does not look at a pattern or form of a shoe to make his shoe, we do not use them. Sixthly, something can be like something else without being derived from it. Seventhly, how can the substance or form and thing which is material it is be isolated from each other. Rather, Aristotle believed that the essence or the universal is in the thing itself. He also argues that saying that the things participate in the forms is vague and does not explain anything.

            He also brought up objections against the Pythagoreans who believed that mathematics and numbers explain and compose everything in the material world and also metaphysical principles and ethics such as virtue being a number. Firstly, he says that their definitions are unclear. Secondly, he says that it is difficult to derive change or motion through numbers alone. Thirdly, numbers are both assigned as the substance and essence of everything, in other words, the basis of what explains reality and reality itself is the same thing which is illogical and contradictory. Basically, the first book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is a critique of the previous philosophers.