ABSTRACT
In the early chapters of this book we explored the importance of Plato’s theory of forms for subsequent understandings of the world. Aristotle, as Plato’s most famed and successful student, did not abandon the notion of forms entirely, but he approached them in a far more nuanced fashion, taking into account many of the criticisms of the theory, including those of Plato himself. Although the complexities of Aristotelian philosophy lie far beyond the scope of this book, the fourfold conception of causality that he introduces still exerts influence today, particularly terminologically. People ‘do not think they know a thing till they have grasped the “why” of it’, Aristotle (2001: 240) observes. This ‘why’ is known as the cause of a thing. He describes four separate kinds of cause, each of which contribute to explaining the genesis of any individual object: efficient cause, material cause, final cause and formal cause.
