Concept
Four causes
Overview
elements of an influential principle in Aristotelian thought
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
We must listen to Aristotle as regards these ancient philosophers, for he speaks most sympathetically of them. In the passage of most importance (Metaph. I. 3), he says: “Since it is clear that we must acquire the science of first causes (_ἐξ ἀρχῆς αἰτίν_), seeing that we say that a person knows a thing when he becomes acquainted with its cause, there are, we must recollect, four causes—Being and Form first (for the…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
Names Four causes.
And again, because the great labour then was with the people (of whom the Pharisees were wont to say, _Execrabilis ista turba_, _quæ non novit legem_), for the winning and persuading of them, there grew of necessity in chief price and request eloquence and variety of discourse, as the fittest and forciblest access into the capacity of the vulgar sort; so that these four causes concurring—the admiration of ancient…
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
The author is tied to Four causes in the knowledge graph; opens on Four causes.
Thus Aristotle says that the Pythagoreans, from the contrasts which number suggests, collected ten principles—Limited and Unlimited, Odd and Even, One and Many, Right and Left, Male and Female, Rest and Motion, Straight and Curved, Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, Square and Oblong.... Aristotle himself deduced the doctrine of four elements and other dogmas by oppositions of the same kind.”
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
Close in meaning to Four causes; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Four causes
- Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg
- The School of Athens
- Walter Terence Stace
- Thierry of Chartres
- F. C. S. Schiller
Related ideas
- Analogy
- Telos
- Morphology (biology)
- Francis Bacon
- Greek language
- Book of Genesis
- Physics (Aristotle)
- Posterior Analytics
- Perseus Digital Library
- Metaphysics
- Organism
- Natural selection
- Jonathan Barnes
- Thomas Aquinas
- Ontology
- Ontogeny
- Francisco J. Ayala
- Physics
- Plato
- Potentiality and actuality
- Scientific law
- Journal of the History of Ideas
- Theory of forms
- Metaphysics (Aristotle)
Place in the tradition
Part of Dramatism.