Mind over Matter

An Argument for Mind, by Jerome Kagan (Yale, 304 pp., $27.50)

ARISTOTLE famously held that to understand something requires knowing its “four causes”: its material cause, the stuff out of which it is made; its formal cause, the specific form or essence that stuff exhibits, and which makes it the kind of thing it is; its efficient cause, that which brought it into existence; and its final cause, the end, purpose, or function it serves. This Aristotelian picture of scientific understanding prevailed until the end of the Middle Ages; indeed, its demise partially constituted the end of the Middle Ages. Modern thought, and especially modern science, are largely defined by their rejection of two of Aristotle’s four causes. For modern science, there are no such things as timeless forms or essences, and there are no ends or purposes in nature. There are just brute material elements related by purposeless, meaningless, mechanical chains of cause and effect. In terms of these austere ingredients alone modern science has sought to account for all the diverse and complex phenomena of the natural and human worlds.

EF

About the Author

Edward Feser

Mr. Feser is the author of Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide and The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism.

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Aristotle

An Argument for Mind, by Jerome Kagan (Yale, 304 pp., $27.50)

ARISTOTLE famously held that to understand something requires knowing its “four causes”: its material cause, the stuff out of which it is made; its formal cause, the specific form or essence that stuff exhibits, and which makes it the kind of thing it is; its efficient cause, that which brought it into existence; and its final cause, the end, purpose, or function it serves. This Aristotelian picture of scientific understanding prevailed until the end of the Middle Ages; indeed, its demise partially constituted the end of the Middle Ages. Modern thought, and especially modern science, are largely defined by their rejection of two of Aristotle’s four causes. For modern science, there are no such things as timeless forms or essences, and there are no ends or purposes in nature. There are just brute material elements related by purposeless, meaningless, mechanical chains of cause and effect. In terms of these austere ingredients alone modern science has sought to account for all the diverse and complex phenomena of the natural and human worlds.