Aristotle · Philosophy
Aristotle’s inquiry into being itself - substance, form and matter, the four causes, potentiality and actuality - culminating in the unmoved mover, the ultimate source of all motion and being.
Aristotle founded metaphysics - the inquiry into the most fundamental nature of reality, into being itself. He called it ‘first philosophy’ - the study of ‘being qua being,’ of what it is to be, of the most fundamental features and principles of reality as such. While the particular sciences study particular kinds of being (physics studies physical things, biology living things), metaphysics studies being as such - the most fundamental nature of reality, what it is for anything to be, the ultimate principles and structure of all that is. This inquiry into being itself - the most fundamental and ambitious of all inquiries - Aristotle founded and pursued with extraordinary depth, asking the deepest questions about the nature of reality: what is being, what is substance, what are the ultimate principles and causes of all that is?
Aristotle held that to fully understand or explain anything, we must know its four causes - four kinds of explanation that answer four different ‘why’ questions about a thing. The material cause: what it is made of (the bronze of a statue). The formal cause: its form, shape, or essence (the shape and design of the statue). The efficient cause: what brought it about, the agent or process that produced it (the sculptor who made the statue). And the final cause: its purpose, end, or function - what it is for (the purpose for which the statue was made - to honour someone, to adorn a temple). To fully explain anything, Aristotle argued, we must understand all four causes - what it is made of, what its form is, what produced it, and what it is for. The four causes - material, formal, efficient, final - provide a complete framework for understanding and explaining things, and especially highlight Aristotle’s characteristic emphasis on final causes (purposes, ends) - his teleological view that things have purposes and ends, that nature does nothing in vain.
Aristotle’s metaphysics culminates in the unmoved mover (or ‘prime mover’) - the ultimate source of all motion and change in the universe, which is itself unmoved and unchanging. Aristotle reasoned that all motion and change must ultimately have a source; that there cannot be an infinite regress of moved movers; and that there must therefore be a first source of motion that is itself unmoved - an unmoved mover that is the ultimate source of all motion and change without itself being moved or changed. This unmoved mover is eternal, immaterial, perfect, and unchanging - pure actuality (with no unrealised potential), the highest being, engaged in the highest activity (the contemplation of itself, thought thinking itself). And remarkably, the unmoved mover moves all things not by pushing them (which would involve its own motion) but as the object of desire and love - as the final cause, the ultimate good and end toward which all things are drawn, moving the universe ‘as the beloved moves the lover.’ The unmoved mover - the eternal, unchanging, perfect ultimate source of all motion, moving all as the object of desire - is the culmination of Aristotle’s metaphysics, and would become, in the hands of later thinkers, the philosophical foundation of the concept of God.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Aristotle inquired into being itself through substance, form and matter, the four causes, and the unmoved mover. Explain these ideas in your own words.
Leads to Thomas Aquinas.
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