IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology
Aristotle is Back!
• https://www.lewrockwell.com, By Bionic MosquitoAt 1 hour 4 minutes in, and for the next ten minutes, he is discussing the intersection of the current science regarding Aristotle's Four Causes. To summarize, Aristotle offered us Four Causes: The Material Cause, the Formal Cause, the Efficient Cause, and the Final Cause.
Material Cause: "that out of which a thing comes to be, and which persists; e.g., bronze, silver, and the genus of these are causes of a statue or a bowl."
Formal Cause: "the form … the account of the essence."
Efficient Cause: "the primary source of change or rest."
Final Cause: "the end (telos), that for which a thing is done."
Modern science jettisoned two of these, keeping only the Efficient Cause and the Material Cause; there is no more Formal or Final Cause. Yet the classical account of virtue and goodness presupposes all four causes. Without a Formal and Final Cause, where is Virtue?
According to Fr. Austriaco, systems biology has recovered a notion of form. Man has about 20,000 genes; rice has 50,000; the worm has 13,000. Before the genome age, it was assumed that complexity was associated with the number of parts. This notion is totally gone now.