Aristotle's Four Causes

ISBN-13: 9781433159299 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 280 str.

Boris Hennig

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Acknowledgements - Introduction - Aristotle's Four Causes - Two Epistemic Directions of Fit - Tode, Ti, Toionde - The Inseparability of Matter - Types and Classes - Essences vs. Properties - Causation - Causal Processes - Basic and Derived Final Causes - Teleological Reasoning - Conclusion - Bibliography - Index.

O autorze

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.