Aristotle's Four Causes and the Possibility of Science | Prof. Joshua Hochschild

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on December 3, 2021 at Youngstown State University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Joshua Hochschild is the Monsignor Robert R. Kline Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he’s been elected to serve as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.7	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:12.5	The title of the lecture is activity and purpose in nature,
0:18.1	Aristotle's four causes, and the possibility of science.
0:25.6	One of the most common stories told about modern science is that it rejects, and indeed was born from a rejection of the Aristotelian theory of nature,
0:35.6	and especially of two of its four causes, formal and final.
0:42.5	It is true, as a matter of history, that many early modern scientists criticized some things they associated with Aristotle.
0:52.1	But as a matter of philosophy, there just are not, in the early modern
0:57.0	scientists, arguments against Aristotle's understanding of causality. Instead, what one finds is
1:05.9	confusion. My aim in this lecture is to offer an unconfused presentation of what Aristotle meant by the four causes,
1:13.6	to make clear that not only has modern science not abandoned them, but that we could not even imagine any genuinely scientific practice or progress which had.
1:25.6	Aristotle was a scientist. or progress, which had.
1:30.1	Aristotle was a scientist.
1:35.3	He was a pioneering naturalist and author of many scientific works.
1:42.2	He wrote treatises on meteorology, astronomy, and physical elements, and at least 15 works on general and special topics in biology, including
1:45.7	aging, breathing, sleeping, dreaming, memory, sensation, parts of animals, generation of animals,
1:54.6	and more.
1:56.7	More often discussed, however, is Aristotle's treatise on the science of nature in general, which we call the physics.
2:04.7	Aristotle's Greek term, fuzis, means nature, or the world available to the senses.
2:11.0	And to avoid confusion with modern specialized physics, classical Aristotelian physics is sometimes just called natural philosophy,
2:19.4	or philosophy of nature. When we want to study a part of nature, a kind of creature or habitat,
2:26.3	a kind of creaturely function like sensing or dreaming or breathing, we define it in a particular
	...

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