[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[HappySkeptic]

I think Martha Nussbaum explains very clearly what Aristotle means by his four causes in this interview with Brian Magee. The part where she explains it begins at 27:15 and ends at 30:45... roughly 3 minutes. I think I set the video to start at the moment I'm speaking of, but I suck at that stuff, so you may have to do it manually.

I'm very interested in clearing up this fuzziness between physicists and Aristotle, because, as far as the four causes go, I don't think physicists should have a beef with Aristotle. He just uses his own (by now antiquated) nomenclature to describe nature. But it is in no way at odds with modern physics. Maybe I'm wrong there. I'd like to get HappySkeptic's opinion on things after hearing Nussbaum's take on the four causes.

I'd also like to hear if Neo agrees with Nussbaum's assessment.

According to Nussbaum,

Aristotle's 4 types of causes:

material cause - made of a certain material
formal explanation - structure
efficient explanation - environment
final cause - teleological (end).  Purpose and function of living things -- they continue to grow towards their natural condition. 

I'm not sure I find these categories very useful, but I have no problems with them.  As a physicist, the first thing to do is describe the system state.  These include the external forces, and the internal configuration.  In some cases, material properties come into play.

As for final cause - this seems to come about because living things appear to work by different rules.  Of course, Aristotle wouldn't know about DNA, cell differentiation, energy metabolism etc, so describing life as having some built-in purpose or function is a catch-all for his lack of understanding (but it still isn't wrong).