Aristotle: The Four Causes

Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in the small town of Stagira on the northeast Coast of Thrace His father was physician to the king of Macedonia. It could be that Aristotle’s great interest in biology and science in general was nurtured in his early childhood. When he was 17 years old, Aristotle moves to Athens to enrol in Plato’s Academy, where he spent the next twenty years as a student and member. There he became the “reader” and “the mind of the school.” He was influenced by Plato’s thought and personality. But then, eventually he broke away from Plato’s philosophy in order to formulate his own idea of some philosophical problems. Still, while at the Academy, he wrote many dialogues in a Platonic style, which his contemporaries praised for

It changes day by day, time by time and nothing last in the world. Everything around us constantly changing and it is one of the basic facts of our experience. It attracted me the most of the term on how he could think about the causes of how everything around us changing. Yes, we realise that we are changing, but we never thought on how we changes. So, in this discussion I will discuss on how Aristotle’s idea of ‘The four Causes’ came up and how he managed to established his ideology about the changing things around him. As a human beings myself, I am really interested in knowing the purpose and how I change day by

The human body is human and the wooden boxes are boxes. In a simple word, the formal cause is what the shape of an object is, or perhaps the structure of the object that makes it what it is. Without the shape, it will only be the material that has potential to be object. Come back to the topic about human, the difference between a mere collection of cells and a human body is that a human body has properties and functions that come from particular arrangement of the right kind of cells doing the right kind of things. A mere collection is not the formal cause, but the human body is the formal cause. Same with the material cause, the formal cause also can be divided into two parts which are formal cause and exemplary cause. An exemplary cause is the plan in someone’s mind that gave rise to something. Things have either a formal cause or an exemplary cause. They cannot exist together, just either