Aristotle's Metaphysics: Causes, Mover, and the Soul

Aristotle's Four Causes of Change

Aristotle identifies four fundamental causes necessary for understanding change and existence:

1. Material Cause: That from which something changes (the raw material).
2. Formal Cause: What determines the structure or essence of matter (the blueprint).
3. Efficient Cause: What starts the process of change (the agent or mover).
4. Final Cause: That for which something changes (the purpose or telos).

Movement and the Prime Mover

Everything that moves has the potential ability to move, but requires a separate cause (an efficient cause or "engine") to actualize its mobility. Similarly, the engine needs a cause to update its power to move; thus, each engine is itself moved. There must be a First Mover if movement is indeed real, and this is central to Aristotle's physics.

The Unmoved Mover: Pure Act

The First Mover, arrived at deductively in physics, must be an engine that is not moved—an immobile engine. This First Mover, having been in power to move, must be Pure Act (Actus Purus). If it is Pure Act, its activity cannot require matter and can only be thinking. This thinking is intuitive, not passing from one object to another, and is presented in a single thought that cannot differentiate subject and object.

The Aristotelian God is primarily the Final Cause, but it also serves as the efficient cause because it eventually causes the initial movement required by serious physics.

First Philosophy: The Study of Being

The classification of sciences left open the possibility of a separate science. The ultimate explanation of motion in physics leads to the scientific demonstration of the Unmoved Mover as Pure Act. However, theology, even when studying the supreme being, remains a special science. Since science is universal, First Philosophy (Metaphysics) deals with that which is most universal.

The Analogy of Being

The term "being" (or "to be") functions in discourse as an analogous term. It does not mean exactly the same thing, as unambiguous terms do, nor does it mean something completely different, as equivocal terms do. Being refers primarily to the primary reality, which is substance, and everything else (the other nine categories of reality) is defined by reference to the substance.

Unity of Metaphysical Objects

Aristotle returned again and again to the difficult problem of the unity of metaphysical science in its triple objective. The real significance of the doctrine of the analogy of being is that it offers a metaphysical justification for the unity of all reality, as conceived by the Ionian philosophers.

Aristotelian Psychology: Soul and Knowledge

Aristotle distinguishes three types of operation related to vital functions:

• Vegetative Soul: Functions of nutrition, growth, and reproduction (defining plant life).
• Sensitive Soul: Perception, locomotion, and appetite (observed in animals).
• Rational Soul: Theoretical and practical knowledge, reflection, deliberation, and choice (the most perfect way of life, occurring in humans).

Aristotle defines the soul as the first act of a natural organized body that has the potential for life.

The Nature of the Human Soul

For Aristotle, the soul is not something from a past existence that binds to matter; rather, it is the actualization of the organized body to live, and it can only be conceptually separated from the body itself. This biological conception of the soul in Aristotle prevents it from being misunderstood, in the Platonic way, as a substantive reality independent of the body.