Causes

   The Four Causes of Aristotle

   Our curiosity about things takes different forms, as Aristotle noted at the dawn of human science. His pioneering effort to classify them still makes a lot of sense. He identified four basic questions we might want answered about anything, and called their answers the four aitia, a truly untranslatable Greek term traditionally but awkwardly translated the four "causes."

   (1) We may be curious about what something is made of, its matter or material cause.

   (2) We may be curious about the form (or structure or shape) that that matter takes, its formal cause.

   (3) We may be curious about its beginning, how it got started, or its efficient cause.

   (4) We may be curious about its purpose or goal or end (as in "Do the ends justify the means?"), which Aristotle called its telos, sometimes translated in English, awkwardly, as "final cause." (Dennett, 1995, p. 23)