Aristotle Scholars HATE Him for Discovering This One Weird Trick

Local man re-reads Aristotle, accidentally fixes 2,300 years of confusion

If you took an introductory philosophy class, you might have been taught Aristotle’s Four Causes. You may even remember them:

• Material cause: what something is made of.

• Formal cause: what kind of thing it is.

• Efficient cause: what makes it happen.

• Final cause: what it is for.

The list is familiar enough that most people stop thinking about it. The Four Causes is sometimes taught as a bit of a historical curiosity, an early attempt to talk about explanation before modern science came along and did it properly.

That reaction misses something important - but not because Aristotle was secretly anticipating modern physics. The problem is that we’ve been reading him through a modern lens that Aristotle simply didn’t share.

Aristotle’s word aitia, usually translated as “cause,” does not necessarily mean a physical force that produces an effect. In Physics II.3, he defines a cause as “that in virtue of which” something is or comes to be. A cause, in other words, is whatever makes something intelligible as what it is.

Once you take that definition seriously, the Four Causes stop looking like four kinds of mechanism and start looking like four directions of explanation.

After we do take that seriously, it might at first be tempting to think Aristotle is working with a mind–body split (mental versus physical) but that’s not quite right either. The real distinction is between physical things and what things are about; which is to say meanings, roles, descriptions, or purposes. Call it ‘aboutness’, ‘concept’, or even ‘intentionality’ to use a philosopher’s word. I suggest Aristotle treats this as perfectly real, but not material.

Seen this way, the Four Causes form a clean 2×2 matrix.

A Quick Reminder of the Canonical Examples

Aristotle’s own examples are well known:

• The bronze of a statue

• The ratio that makes something an octave

• The father of the child

• Health as the reason for walking

These examples appear in the Physics and also the Metaphysics. Aristotle clearly thought they illustrated something stable.

What’s striking, once you look closely, is that none of them require anything like a physical push. Even the efficient cause - the father of the child - is not a force or a motion. It is a physical fact that grounds a role.

That should already make us suspicious of the usual 21st century framing.

The Hidden Structure: Physical and Aboutness

Here is the proposal.

Aristotle’s Four Causes are not four kinds of ‘pushes’. They are four ways one thing can be explained in virtue of another, depending on whether what is doing the explaining - and what is being explained - is physical or aboutness.

Laid out explicitly, the structure looks like this:

• physical explained by physical

• aboutness explained by aboutness

• aboutness explained by physical

• physical explained by aboutness

Those are the Four Causes.

Material Cause: the physical in virtue of the physical

This is the easiest case.

Silver explains the bowl because the properties of silver constrain what can be made and how it will behave. Bronze explains the statue, and wood explains the table.

Aristotle defines matter as “that out of which” a thing comes to be, so there is no ‘aboutness’ (think role or meaning) here yet - just physical constraint answering a physical question.

This is explanation entirely in the physical sense.

Formal Cause: aboutness in virtue of aboutness

Form, for Aristotle, is not primarily ‘shape’. It is logos - the account of what something is. In Metaphysics Z, form is identified with “the what-it-was-to-be” of a thing.

The octave is Aristotle’s favourite example. An octave is an octave because of the ratio 2:1 (the ratio between, say, strings you need to hit to create a musical octave). But here that ratio is not important because of actual vibrations. It is, instead, an explanation, or definition, of what that sound counts as.

Here, one piece of aboutness explains another; meaning is grounded in meaning. No physical process is doing the explanatory work at this level, and none needs to.

Efficient Cause: aboutness in virtue of the physical

This is where the standard reading of ‘efficient causation’ is usually seen as the type of “cause” closest to the one we know in contemporary English.

Thus efficient cause is often seen as “the physical cause.” But Aristotle’s own examples don’t support that. He says, plainly, that “the father is the cause of the child.”

So why is this a cause at all?

Because “child” is not just a biological description. It is also a role, or a concept. Something counts as a concept ‘child’ in virtue of a physical relation. In other words the physical fact licenses a meaning.

The same structure appears in Aristotle’s account of action. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he insists that without intention there is no action, only movement. A bodily motion becomes an action only when it is intelligible as something someone did.

In both cases, a physical reality grounds an aboutness. That is efficient causation as Aristotle understands it, plausibly not as a force, but as a source - and it is that worldly basis that grounds the description.

Final Cause: the physical in virtue of aboutness

Finally, the most familiar and the most controversial case.

Aristotle says that health is the cause of walking. To modern ears, this sounds backward. We might even use the word “teleological,” which has connotations of being “unscientific.” It seems strange - how can something abstract explain something physical?

But the explanation is straightforward once we stop assuming that causes must be physical pushes. Walking counts as exercise because it is done for the sake (or the ‘aboutness’) of health. Without that end, the same bodily motions would not be the same activity.

Thus final causes explain physical processes in virtue of what they are about. They appeal to orientation rather than mechanism.

Why This Rereading Matters

On this interpretation, Aristotle’s Four Causes are not four rival explanations of the same event. They are four distinct explanatory relations, each appropriate to a different kind of question.

• Material cause answers physical questions about constraint.

• Formal cause answers conceptual questions about definition.

• Efficient cause answers questions about how meaning gets anchored in the world.

• Final cause answers questions about why physical processes take the form they do.

Modern philosophy has spent centuries trying to reduce all explanation to one corner of this grid: physical explained by physical. When it fails - as it inevitably does - meaning and purpose are declared illusory.

Aristotle’s framework avoids that trap, not by rejecting science, but by refusing to confuse different kinds of explanation.

He was not offering a primitive physics, more likely he was offering a map of intelligibility.

If that sounds unfamiliar, it may be because we’ve been reading him with the wrong expectations. Aristotle wasn’t trying to tell us what pushes what. He was trying to tell us what makes something the kind of thing it is.

Once you read him that way, the Four Causes stop looking like historical debris. They start to look like a distinction we keep forgetting we need.