4 Causes

Aristotle’s four causes fail as a description of the real world

Aristotle said there are 4 ways in which we can explain and understand the things in our world. These are called the 4 causes and included the material, efficient, formal and final causes. Aristotle, different to how his teacher Plato, saw the physical world categorised using our sense was the real world whereas Plato saw the world as a material realm imitating the world of the forms.
To some Aristotle’s fail   because Aristotle believed that abstract ideas and thoughts such as faith, truth, beauty and emotion like hate, love, sadness are just personal experiences, we create these emotions and ideas for ourselves. Most people find this hard to believe, as a human being we want to believe that things like love actually exists and not just a thought in our head that does not actually exist. People believe in soul mates, loves of their life and this is hard because then what they believe in would be a lie and you could really say anyone in the world is the love of your life because it is a creation we make to get though our lives with happiness another feeling which we create for ourselves. No one wants to believe in this and so it would be easier to go with Plato’s theory of Forms because Plato believe that there were Forms for things like happiness, love, beauty and they take many form in the ‘material world’. Also because to a modern person only the first two causes are relevant, the material, what it is made of, and the efficient, where it came from. This is easy to relate to the physical world as everything is made of something and everything has come from somewhere. But the formal and final relate to its characteristics and purpose which are undefinable. Who is to say what a humans characteristics and purpose is?
However others may argue that the theory of the 4 causes is a good description of reality because it allows individuality which is evident in all things. Whereas Plato says that all...