Aristotle · Philosophy
What being, change, and purpose are - and what ultimately moves everything.
Every science gets a portion of the world. Physics takes physical things, biology living things. None of them asks the question they all step over: what it is for anything to be at all.
Aristotle claimed that question for a discipline of its own, and called it first philosophy - the study of being qua being, being just insofar as it is. Each of the other sciences takes one kind of being; this one takes the structure of reality as such. In the Metaphysics he then narrows the vast question to a sharp one. To ask what being is, he holds, is to ask what substance is - what exists in its own right, rather than as a property of something else.
Which turns the grandest question in philosophy into a homely one: what is any particular thing, over and above the stuff it happens to be made of?
Ask why a bronze statue exists, and four different answers are all true at once. It is made of bronze: the material cause, what a thing is made of. It is cast in the shape of a figure: the formal cause, the organisation that makes it a statue. A sculptor produced it: the efficient cause, the agent that brought it about. And it stands there to honour someone: the final cause, what the thing is for.
Notice what kind of list this is: four kinds of explanation answering four different why-questions about one statue, not four rival theories. We do not know a thing, Aristotle held, until we have grasped all four.
The fourth is the one the modern world threw out. Galileo and Newton built a physics of mechanism and mathematical law, in which motion is explained by forces and nothing in nature aims at anything. If they are right, final causes add nothing to any explanation, and the four causes collapse into one - the efficient cause, the push from behind. His own defence begins further back, with a puzzle about whether anything can change at all.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You studied Aristotle’s Metaphysics . From memory: state his analysis of any concrete thing, his account of what change is, and what the unmoved mover is and how it moves anything.
Leads to Thomas Aquinas.
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