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The four causes or four explanations are, in Aristotelian thought, categories of questions that explain "the why's" of something that exists or changes in nature. The four causes are the: material cause , the formal cause , the efficient cause , and the final cause .
Thomism is the philosophical and theological school which arose as a legacy of the work and thought of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Dominican philosopher, theologian, and Doctor of the Church. In philosophy, Thomas's disputed questions and commentaries on Aristotle are perhaps his best-known works.
Thomas was a proponent of natural theology and the father of a school of thought (encompassing both theology and philosophy) known as Thomism. Central to his thought was the doctrine of natural law , which he argued was accessible to human reason and grounded in the very nature of human beings, providing a basis for understanding individual ...
But it is not possible for something to be the cause of itself because this would entail that it exists prior to itself, which is a contradiction. If that by which it is caused is itself caused, then it too must have a cause. But this cannot be an infinitely long chain, so, there must be a cause which is not itself caused by anything further.
While actuality is linked by Aristotle to his concept of a formal cause, potentiality (or potency) on the other hand, is linked by Aristotle to his concepts of hylomorphic matter and material cause. Aristotle wrote for example that "matter exists potentially, because it may attain to the form; but when it exists actually, it is then in the form."
In the theory developed by Spanish theologian Domingo Báñez and other Thomists of the 16th-century second scholasticism, physical premotion (Latin: praemotio physica) is a causal influence of God into a secondary cause (especially into a will of a free agent) which precedes (metaphysically but not temporally) and causes the actual motion of its causal power (e.g. a will): it is the reduction ...
Mortimer Jerome Adler (/ ˈ æ d l ər /; December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001) was an American philosopher, educator, encyclopedist, popular author and lay theologian.As a philosopher he worked within the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions.
Aristotelianism (/ ˌ ær ɪ s t ə ˈ t iː l i ə n ɪ z əm / ARR-i-stə-TEE-lee-ə-niz-əm) is a philosophical tradition inspired by the work of Aristotle, usually characterized by deductive logic and an analytic inductive method in the study of natural philosophy and metaphysics.