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The formal cause of a change or movement. This is a change or movement caused by the arrangement, shape, or appearance of the thing changing or moving. Aristotle says, for example, that the ratio 2:1, and number in general, is the formal cause of the octave. Efficient, or agent The efficient or moving cause of a change or movement.
The examples which Aristotle adduces do not obviously suggest an application to the first unmoved mover, and it is at least possible that Aristotle originated his fourfold distinction without reference to such an entity. But the real question is whether his definition of the efficient cause includes the unmoved mover willy-nilly.
For example, in Aristotle's efficient causal explanation, an action can be a cause while an enduring object is its effect. For example, the generative actions of his parents can be regarded as the efficient cause, with Socrates being the effect, Socrates being regarded as an enduring object, in philosophical tradition called a 'substance', as ...
As in the First Way, the causes Aquinas has in mind are not sequential events, but rather simultaneously existing dependency relationships: Aristotle's efficient cause. For example, plant growth depends on sunlight and water, which depend on "ideal atmospheric activities", which are "governed by more fundamental causes", and so on. [7]
Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one.
An example of singular causation is that I woke this morning because my alarm clock rang. An example of nomic causation is that alarm clocks generally wake people in the morning. Aristotle recognises singular causality as efficient causality. For Whitehead, there are many contributory singular causes for an event.
Occasionalism is a philosophical doctrine about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God . (A related concept, which has been called "occasional causation", also denies a link of efficient causation between mundane events, but may differ as to ...
St. Thomas adds that "the maximum of any genus is the cause of all that in that genus," to indicate that the greatest in truth, goodness, and being is both the exemplar and efficient cause of all other things which display varying degrees of perfection, and so is "the cause of all beings." [9] [6] Causal structure of argument