1 of 1- Due_Kindheartedness
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Why Four Causes?
Aristotle breaks down causality into four fundamental causes: efficient causality, material causality, formal causality, and final causality. However, does he provide a proof that these four causes completely and exhaustively cover all forms of causality? It's okay when mathematicians speak of the five Platonic solids, or the seventeen tiling of the plane, because mathematicians have provided a valid proof that there are only five Platonic solids and only seventeen tilling groups of the plane. However, I am unaware of any proof that these four fundamental causes are the complete, exhaustive, and only causes.
- Jean65
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Re: Why Four Causes?
I don't know if he provides a proof that this description is completely exhaustive. But there are proofs that shows that there are at least 4 aspects of causation that are needed to be considered.
The necessity of the 4 causes depends on the reflection we can build upon the concept of change and what is included by this concept, ie what it is to change. I think you know you cannot have more (or less) than 4 causes when you've said everything that is necessary to grasp causation.
Last edited by Jean65 (4/20/2016 5:28 pm)
- iwpoe
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Re: Why Four Causes?
Indeed, he doesn't show them exhaustive: subsequent Platonic thought considers 2 more, instrumental and paradigmatic.
I think motivational causes are a plausible 7th, at least when talking about people and higher beings: 'I bought more shampoo because I'm out.' is not what Aristotle means by a final cause.
Heidegger's discussion of world and the being of tools presents perhaps an 8th.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
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It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
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- Greg
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Re: Why Four Causes?
John Haldane argues that there are social causes: "Gravitas, Moral Efficacy and Social Causes", Analysis, Vol. 68, 2008.
iwpoe wrote:
I think motivational causes are a plausible 7th, at least when talking about people and higher beings: 'I bought more shampoo because I'm out.' is not what Aristotle means by a final cause.
I'm not so sure about that. I think there is some hidden intentional structure to 'I bought more shampoo because I'm out'. One needs more shampoo (for various reasons--health, being socially presentable, not smelling unpleasantly), so one buys shampoo. So one sees buying shampoo as good in the sense useful, and good has the nature of an end. There's certainly something to say about the distance between ends like that (or even like health) and the final end of humans, though. Perhaps such ends stand to man's end something like habit as "second nature" stands to man's nature.
- Due_Kindheartedness
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Re: Why Four Causes?
I don't know if he provides a proof that this description is completely exhaustive. But there are proofs that shows that there are at least 4 aspects of causation that are needed to be considered.
The necessity of the 4 causes depends on the reflection we can build upon the concept of change and what is included by this concept, ie what it is to change. I think you know you cannot have more (or less) than 4 causes when you've said everything that is necessary to grasp causation.
I would be interested in seeing such proofs if possible.
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Thread Starter- iwpoe
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Re: Why Four Causes?
I'm not so sure about that. I think there is some hidden intentional structure to 'I bought more shampoo because I'm out'. One needs more shampoo (for various reasons--health, being socially presentable, not smelling unpleasantly), so one buys shampoo. So one sees buying shampoo as good in the sense useful, and good has the nature of an end. There's certainly something to say about the distance between ends like that (or even like health) and the final end of humans, though. Perhaps such ends stand to man's end something like habit as "second nature" stands to man's nature.
I'm not sure. This is one of two cases where I think Schopenhauer has true philosophical merit: he thinks re the will ‘If a person P performed action A, then P had a motive M to do A, and M is a desire to do A, one that was prompted by decision D to do A.'
M is a motivational cause that only deliberative beings like us can have whereas plants and lower animals (even objects) can have tele. You can make a reductive argument that these are something like worked up tele, but I think that motivations are distinct in kind from tele, that they often act in concert, but that their failure to act in concert is what we mean by weakness of will. When Paul says:
Romans 7:15-20
15 For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. 16 But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good. 17 So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. 19 For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. 20 But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.
He is talking about a disconnect between our corrupt nature (distorted tele) and our good will, which I construe as a disconnect between our motivational causes and final causes.
Then when he speaks elsewhere:
1 Corinthians 7:9:
But if they do not have self-control, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.
Self-control refers to a control over certain sexual tele by motivational causes, and marriage is the concession to tele over a will that is usually insufficient to control them.
I'm not sure whether social causes are reducible to a bunch of motivational causes or some emergent property of them or if they are their own kind of cause or something else. In economics, history, and sociology (and derivativly in some parts of the humanities) one in ambiguious about their ulitmate ontological nature, but it's clear that they are necessary in these disciplines.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
My Books
It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
- Greg
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Re: Why Four Causes?
This is one of two cases where I think Schopenhauer has true philosophical merit: he thinks re the will ‘If a person P performed action A, then P had a motive M to do A, and M is a desire to do A, one that was prompted by decision D to do A.'
M is a motivational cause that only deliberative beings like us can have whereas plants and lower animals (even objects) can have tele. You can make a reductive argument that these are something like worked up tele, but I think that motivations are distinct in kind from tele, that they often act in concert, but that their failure to act in concert is what we mean by weakness of will.
My instinct here is to say that these are like worked up tele. I'd first note that Schopenhauer's formula here does not draw out the full structure of an action. Take Anscombe's famous example:
A man is pumping water into the cistern which supplies the drinking water of a house. Someone has found a way of systematically contaminating the source with a deadly cumulative poison whose effects are unnoticeable until they can no longer be cured. The house is regularly inhabited by a small group of party chiefs, with their immediate families, who are in control of a great state; they are engaged in exterminating the Jews and perhaps plan a world war.—The man who contaminated the source has calculated that if these people are destroyed some good men will get into power who will govern well, or even institute the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and secure a good life for all the people; and he has revealed the calculation, together with the fact about the poison, to the man who is pumping. (Intention §23)
What is the agent doing? Well clearly enough he is pumping. He might even be assassinating his targets, perhaps assassination the group of party chiefs, perhaps saving the Jews or preventing the war. If he shares his employer's aims he might even be be trying to get good men into power or to institute the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
What he is doing is a function of what he intends, those objects which he aims at, the ends of his action. But actions are composed of means to ends, and the means are also proximate ends. So actions, as I see it, have a telic structure through and through. An agent performs an action because he finds the end desirable in some sense, that is, sees it as an end. But he takes a similar stance vis-a-vis the means.
For that reason, I suppose one might want to say that this is consistent with seeing desires as motive causes even if ends also enter the picture as the objects of desires. I am not sure I would regard this as a distinct sort of cause.
Another sort of "reason for action" sometimes called a "motive" in the intention literature is more efficient causal: "Why did you jump?" "There was a loud noise." This sort of answer does not reveal that the "action" was intentional, and one was "moved" by the noise. I think "motives" might have a role even in full-fledged intentional action, in the context of the reason and will's "conversation." Deliberation starts with the desirability of the end, and this prompts the searching for means and ultimately the command of reason. But I think the role here is essentially efficient causal.