Aristotle: Cause and Purpose and Prime Mover

Aristotle

• Empiricist - believed in sense experience
• Student of Plato
• Rejected Plato's Forms
• Aristotle said everything has potential

Potentiality= Something that has the potential to be something different
Actuality= When an object fulfills its potential and becomes something different.

Causes

1. Material - E.g. Logs.

2. Efficient - E.g. The carpenter.

3. Formal - E.g. The object has the characteristics of a table, four legs, a top.

4. Final - E.g. The table fulfills its purpose as a table.

Something is perfect if it fulfills it's Final Cause, its purpose.
Beginings of Natural Law thought.

"The series must start with something, since nothing can come from nothing" Aristotle - Metaphysics.

• Everything exists in a state of change or 'motion'
  • E.g. weather, people age, seasons, colours

"There must be a mover which moves them, without being moved, being eternal substance, and actuality" - Aristotle

• The chain of movement must lead to something which moves but itself is motionless
  • This was observed in the way that:
    • The physical world is in constant change
    • Planets seem to have moved eternally
    • Change/motion is cause by something 'else'
    • Material objects are in a state of actuality of potentiality

Aristotle's Prime Mover must be:

• Necessary
  Everlasting
  Metaphysical

Aristotle's Prime Move is linked to God (Not necessarily the Christian concept of God though)

• The Prime Mover cannot cause motion physically as this would mean he moves and he is supposed to be motionless.
• Therefore he must remain still and move things by drawing them to him.

The final cause of movement is 'a love of desire for God':

• God is perfection and everything wants to imitate this and so is drawn to it.

• God is necessary because there must be an eternal transcendant substance that does not move.

• God is the actuality of the universe.

"We must assert that it is necessary that there should be an eternal unmovable substance" - Aristotle, Metaphysics

• The Prime Mover must be immaterial it cannot be made of something that has the potential to change
• The Prime Mover cannot move physically so the activity of the Prime Mover is thought.

Attributes of the PM:

1.) Immaterial
2.) Spiritual
3.) Intellectual

Aristotle's Prime Mover is different to the Christian God as it does not interact with the world.

WEAKNESSES

• Aristotle has no concrete evidence for believing the material world is the source of true knowledge.
• Many people do no believe that everything has a purpose.
  • Albert Camus French Writer said "the universe is absurd"
  • Meaning there's no way to understand the universe, it's ridiculous to try
• The Prime Mover must come from something
  • "The series must start with something, since nothing can come from nothing" - Aristotle
• Aristotle's principles come from empirical knowledge but no one has ever seen something move through thought.