Aristotle
- Created by: ElizabethH2525
- Created on: 25-04-19 18:17
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- Aristotle's ideas
- Empiricism
- Gaining knowledge through the senses and sensory experience
- A posteriori: after observation
- There's only one real world: what we experience
- Realised that everything in the world is in a state of flux: impermanent
- Actuality and potentiality
- Potentiality: the possibility of doing something or becoming something
- Actuality: when potential is achieved
- Interested in the movement from potentiality to actuality
- What caused them to actualize their potential/ exist?
- The Four Causes
- The Material Cause
- The matter or substance that something is made of
- Have the potential to change
- Represents impermanence
- Can be divided into 2
- Prime matter
- Has no matter at all
- Doesn't exist, but is theoretically necessary
- Proximate matter
- Matter that has some properties
- Prime matter
- The Efficient Cause
- The cause of something existing: pushes it into existence
- Doesn't necessarily have to be a person e.g. could be a gust of wind
- An object may even have more than one efficient cause
- Every change is caused by an efficient cause
- Answers "what" but not "how"
- The Formal Cause
- What gives the matter its form or structure
- Mentally fitting an object into a category we already know
- Gives it shape so it can be identified
- Final cause
- The reason why something is the way it is
- Teleological: the function of an object of the reason an action is done
- Telos = end, as it is the means to an end
- Something is good when it fulfils its telos
- Telos = end, as it is the means to an end
- The purpose of an object: the reason it exists at all
- Teleological: the function of an object of the reason an action is done
- The reason why something is the way it is
- The Material Cause
- The Prime Mover
- The final cause: our purpose but not doesn't bring about change, otherwise would be changed itself
- Causes things to move by attraction
- A cause that actualizes the potential in everything else
- Must be God: if the PM could be caused, infinite regression would continue
- His perfection provides a purpose for change: to achieve perfection through imitation. This is the goal/purpose for changing
- Qualities
- Unmoveable
- Can only think of himself = not the efficient cause. I.e. impersonal
- Necessary: the cause of all other things existing
- Immaterial, beyond time and space: all matter is capable to being acted upon, and all matter is contingent
- Perfectly good: pure actuality so contains everything that ought to be there
- The final cause: our purpose but not doesn't bring about change, otherwise would be changed itself
- Empiricism
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