Abstract
This chapter focuses on Aristotle’s theory of the four causes and the way Aristotle applies this explicative framework to living beings. Their material cause is the body parts, the functional units from which their bodies are composed. The efficient cause is identified with the father, or rather father’s form (species). In the course of embryogenesis, this cause is internalised and the nascent organism itself becomes the cause of its vital movements, including the movement of self-formation. The formal cause is to be understood dynamically, as a complex of vital movements in which a particular, species-specific manner of life takes place. This form of a living body is its soul, i.e., its propre animation. Thus understood, the form merges with the final cause. Finality, or the aiming at a predefined final state, is characteristic of embryogenesis as the ontogenetic movement which (normally) leads to offspring that resemble their parents, both individually and in terms of species. The final cause of the body parts is the function they have in the body; they develop in order to exercise their vital activities. The whole organism does not serve an external purpose: its finality is to be itself, to fulfil its own form.
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Notes
- 1.
Aristotle of course did not call his theories about the realm of the living ‘biology’. That is a modern expression.
- 2.
- 3.
The heterogeneity of examples listed here shows that Aristotle’s aim is to formulate a universal theory of causality; causal explanation specifically in biology is addressed in PA I.
- 4.
Aristotle himself does not use the term analogy when speaking about the two ontological domains, but – as becomes apparent below – it is a relatively accurate name for his comparative approach to them.
- 5.
From our perspective, Aristotle’s position may seem to underestimate the role of females, but in the context of contemporary debates it presented a conceptual compromise between, on one side, the two-seed theories (widespread among Hippocratic physicians), which downplay or neglect the differences between the male and female contribution to reproduction, and on the other side, the notion of a ‘mother as a fertile furrow’, according to which the embryo is begotten solely by the father (Lefebvre, 2016).
- 6.
Paradigmatic natural entities are animals, because they are capable of all of the abovementioned movements (plants do not engage in locomotion, and the elements are not the cause of their rest: in the absence of any obstacles, they necessarily move to their proper cosmic places).
- 7.
Cf. Gotthelf, 1987, 207: ‘First, in almost every passage in which Aristotle introduces, discusses, or argues for the existence of final causality, his attention is focused on the generation and development of a living organism.’
- 8.
Let us note that Greek tradition ascribes the origins of craftsmanship to the gods. Moreover, individual input and originality were not (until the Modern Era) something that would be especially appreciated in art and/or production. In this view, there is little space for ‘progress’ or cultural evolution, which corresponds also to the fact that Aristotle does not believe in any biological evolution.
- 9.
Although there are discussions, for instance, about convergent evolution of particular traits in different groups of animals, ‘hard core’ finalists are among current biologists rather an exception. The position according to which any possible rational beings will necessarily look like actual humans is nowadays held basically only by Conway Morris (2003).
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Fulínová, E. (2024). Aristotle: Life as Self-Creation. In: Švorcová, J. (eds) Organismal Agency. Biosemiotics, vol 28. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53626-7_2
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