Aristotle metaphysics book 7 pdf

So hard work is the efficient cause of fitness, since one becomes fit by means of hard work, while fitness is the final cause of hard work, since one works hard in order to become fit.

The job of a cause or principle of being, he notes, is to explain why one thing belongs to another a 11 ; that is, it is to explain some predicational fact. What needs to be explained, for example, is why this is a man , or that is a house.

But what kind of a question is this? The only thing that can be a man is a man; the only thing that can be a house is a house. So we would appear to be asking why a man is a man, or why a house is a house, and these seem to be foolish questions that all have the same answer: because each thing is itself a 17— The questions must therefore be rephrased by taking advantage of the possibility of a hylomorphic analysis.

We must ask, e. The answer Aristotle proposes is that the cause of being of a substance e. The essence is not always just a formal cause; in some cases, Aristotle says, it is also a final cause he gives the examples of a house and a bed , and in some cases an efficient cause a 29— But the answer Aristotle proposes invokes a hylomorphic analysis of these questions, in which form is predicated of matter.

So Callias is a man because the form or essence of man is present in the flesh and bones that constitute the body of Callias; Fallingwater is a house because the form of house is present in the materials of which Fallingwater is made. In general, a species predication is explained in terms of an underlying form predication, whose subject is not the particular compound but its matter.

Form predications are thus more basic than their corresponding species predications. A substantial form, as a primary definable, is its own substance, for it is essentially predicated of itself alone.

The form is therefore, in a derivative way, the substance of the compound, as well. The matter of a substance is the stuff it is composed of; the form is the way that stuff is put together so that the whole it constitutes can perform its characteristic functions.

But soon he begins to apply the distinction diachronically, across time. Aristotle distinguishes between two different senses of the term dunamis. In the strictest sense, a dunamis is the power that a thing has to produce a change. Aristotle thinks that potentiality so understood is indefinable a 37 , claiming that the general idea can be grasped from a consideration of cases. This last illustration is particularly illuminating.

Consider, for example, a piece of wood, which can be carved or shaped into a table or into a bowl. The matter in this case, wood is linked with potentialty; the substance in this case, the table or the bowl is linked with actuality. The as yet uncarved wood is only potentially a table, and so it might seem that once it is carved the wood is actually a table. Perhaps this is what Aristotle means, but it is possible that he does not wish to consider the wood to be a table.

The idea here is that it is not the wood qua wood that is actually a table, but the wood qua table. Considered as matter, it remains only potentially the thing that it is the matter of. A contemporary philosopher might make this point by refusing to identify the wood with the table, saying instead that the wood only constitutes the table and is not identical to the table it constitutes.

Since Aristotle gives form priority over matter, we would expect him similarly to give actuality priority over potentiality. Aristotle distinguishes between priority in logos account or definition , in time, and in substance. A particular acorn is, of course, temporally prior to the particular oak tree that it grows into, but it is preceded in time by the actual oak tree that produced it, with which it is identical in species.

The seed potential substance must have been preceded by an adult actual substance. So in this sense actuality is prior even in time. Form or actuality is the end toward which natural processes are directed. As we noted in Section 11, one and the same thing may be the final, formal, and efficient cause of another.

Suppose an acorn realizes its potential to become an oak tree. The efficient cause here is the actual oak tree that produced the acorn; the formal cause is the logos defining that actuality; the final cause is the telos toward which the acorn develops—an actual mature oak tree. A potentiality is for either of a pair of opposites; so anything that is capable of being is also capable of not being.

What is capable of not being might possibly not be, and what might possibly not be is perishable. Hence anything with the mere potentiality to be is perishable. What is eternal is imperishable, and so nothing that is eternal can exist only potentially—what is eternal must be fully actual.

But the eternal is prior in substance to the perishable. For the eternal can exist without the perishable, but not conversely, and that is what priority in substance amounts to cf.

So what is actual is prior in substance to what is potential. His task is to explain the unity of such complexes. He offers the following example a 26— For bronze is the matter, and roundness is the form. The bronze is potentially round, and round is what the bronze actually is when it has received this form. Since the cloak is something that was produced, or brought into being, there is no cause of its unity other than the agent who put the form into the matter.

Bronze the matter is a potential sphere, and the cloak is an actual sphere. But round bronze is equally the essence of both the actual sphere and the potential one. The bronze and the roundness are not two separate things. The bronze is potentially a sphere, and when it is made round it constitutes an actual one—a single sphere of bronze. It is easy to see how this hylomorphic analysis explains the unity of a substantial material particular, since neither the matter nor the form of such a particular is by itself a single material individual, and it is only when they are taken together that they constitute such an individual.

Since proper definables are universals, it remains to be seen how the proposed solution applies to them. After all, universals are not material objects, and so it is not clear how they can be viewed as hylomorphic compounds. But Aristotle has at his disposal a concept that can fill this bill perfectly, viz.

The main purpose of intelligible matter is to provide something quasi-material for pure geometrical objects that are not realized in bronze or stone, for example, to be made of. So we surmise that it is for this reason that Aristotle goes on a 33 to introduce matter into the current context.

If this is so, we may conclude that the material component in the definition of a species is intelligible matter. So a species too, although it is not itself a material object, can be considered a hylomorphic compound.

Its matter is its genus, which is only potentially the species defined; its differentia is the form that actualizes the matter.

The genus does not actually exist independently of its species any more than bronze exists apart from all form. The genus animal , for example, is just that which is potentially some specific kind of animal or other. This solution, of course, applies only to hylomorphic compounds. But that is all it needs to do, according to Aristotle. The science of being qua being is a science of form. But it is also theology, the science of god.

The question now is, how can it be both? And to it Aristotle gives a succinct answer:. So the primacy of theology, which is based on the fact that it deals with substance that is eternal, immovable, and separable, is supposedly what justifies us in treating it as the universal science of being qua being.

A reminder, first, of what this primacy is. As we saw in Sections 2—3 above, only beings in the category of substance are separable, so that they alone enjoy a sort of ontological priority that is both existential and explanatory.

The starting-points and causes of all beings, then, must be substances. But for all that has been shown so far, the universe could still be made up of lots of separate substances having little ontologically to do with each other. Here it may serve to return to Z. Almost as quickly a 7—32 , the first two candidates are at least provisionally excluded. A—perhaps the —major ground for their exclusion is the primacy dilemma , which we shall now briefly investigate.

The philosophical background to the dilemma is this. If you are a realist about scientific knowledge and truth, as Aristotle is, the structure of your scientific theories must mirror the structure of reality, so that scientific starting-points or first principles, must also be the basic building blocks of reality.

Suppose that this is not so. Suppose that your physics tells you that atoms are the basic building blocks of reality and that your psychology tells you that sense-perceptions are the starting-points of scientific knowledge. Then you will face a very severe problem, that of skepticism. Your sense-perceptions are consistent with your being always asleep and having a very detailed dream. The basic building blocks of reality, Aristotelian science tells us, are particular matter-form compounds.

There is no science of you, or of me, though there is one of human beings. How, then, can science possibly be reflecting accurately the structure of reality, when its starting-points and those of reality fail so radically to map onto each other? For there is no greater difference, it seems, than that between particulars and universals. The thing to do, then, given that science provides our best access to the nature of reality, is to investigate the universal forms or essences that are basic to it.

Aristotle begins the investigation with the most familiar and widely recognized case, which is the form or essence present in sublunary matter-form compounds. It is announced in Z. And by then it is with actuality entelecheia or activity energeia that form is identified, and matter with potentiality. The science of being qua being can legitimately focus on form, or actuality, then, as the factor common to all substances, and so to all the beings.

But unless it can be shown that there is some explanatory connection between the forms of all these substances, the non-fragmentary nature of being itself will still not have been established, and the pictures given to us by the various sciences will, so to speak, be separate pictures, and the being they collectively portray, divided. Matter-form compounds are, as such, capable of movement and change. The canonical examples of them—perhaps the only genuine or fully fledged ones—are living metabolizing beings Z.

But if these beings are to be actual, there must be substances whose very essence is activity—substances that do not need to be activated by something else. With matter-form compounds shown to be dependent on substantial activities for their actual being, a further element of vertical unification is introduced into beings, since layer-wise the two sorts of substances belong together.

Laterally, though, disunity continues to threaten. For as yet nothing has been done to exclude the possibility of each compound substance having a distinct substantial activity as its own unique activator. Being, in that case, would be a set of ordered pairs, the first member of which would be a substantial activity, the second a matter-form compound, with all its dependent attributes.

He asks how many substantial activities are required to explain astronomical phenomena, such as the movements of the stars and planets, and answers that there must be forty-nine of them a But these forty-nine are coordinated with each other so as to form a system.

And what enables them to do so, and to constitute a single heaven, is that there is a single prime mover of all of them:. What accounts for the unity of the heaven, then, is that the movements in it are traceable back to a single cause: the prime or primary mover.

Leaving aside the question of just how this primary mover moves what it moves directly, the next phase in the unification of beings is the one in which the sublunary world is integrated with the already unified superlunary one studied by astronomy.

And beyond even this there is the unity of the natural world itself, which is manifested in the ways in which its inhabitants are adapted to each other:. Thus the sublunary realm is sufficiently integrated with the superlunary one that we can speak of them as jointly having a nature and a ruler, and as being analogous to an army a 13 and a household a We may agree, then, that the divine substances in the superlunary realm and the compound substances in the sublunary one have prima facie been vertically integrated into a single explanatory system.

Still awaiting integration, though, are mathematical objects, such as numbers. But in Books M and N these are shown to be not substantial starting-points and causes but abstractions from perceptible sublunary beings—they are dependent entities, in other words, rather than self-subsistent ones. Similarly, in Physics II. This completes the vertical and horizontal unification of being: attributes depend on substances, substantial matter-form compounds depend on substantial forms, or activities, numbers depend on matter-form compounds.

The long argument that leads to this conclusion is thus a sort of proof of the existence, and so of the possibility, of the science on which the Metaphysics focuses. It is also the justification for the claim, which we looked at before, that the science of being qua being is in fact theology a 27— There, then, in the starry heavens above us, are the forty-nine celestial spheres, all moving eternally in fixed circular orbits. The outermost one, which contains all the others, is the primary heaven.

Questions immediately arise: i how is the primary heaven moved by the primary mover, the primary god? Thus the primary heaven is moved by the primary god, in the way that we are moved by a good that we desire. That this heaven, as well as the other heavenly bodies, are therefore alive is argued for in De Caelo II. But ii how can the primary god be such a good? Moreover, iii why is he not moved by something else again?

What the primary heaven is moved by, then, is the wish to be in the good state of active contemplation that we, when we are happiest, are in, and that the primary god is always in because he just is that activity. Just as we seek the good that the primary god is, so too does the primary heaven and its forty-eight celestial companions. This brings us to question iii. When the understanding is actively contemplating something, that something—that intelligible object—is what activates it.

God is the understanding that understands himself, because his understanding is like ours would be if we imagine it as being the intelligible equivalent of seeing light without seeing any other visible object. From the inside, then, from the point of view of the subject experiencing it, it is a state of consciousness of a sort familiar from the writings of the great religious mystics, in which both subject and object disappear from an awareness that yet remains fully and truly attentive, fully alive and joyous.

Insofar as we have any experience-based evidence of what a beatific state is like, this one surely approximates to it. Were we to experience it or something like it, then, there is some reason to think that we would agree that it is bliss indeed, blessed happiness unalloyed. This is the conclusion Aristotle himself comes to and defends in Nicomachean Ethics X.

Practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom, it follows, have the same ultimate starting-point, the same first principle, so that wisdom, too, is something unified. The idea is this. Since forms or essences are universals, you and I may both know the same form, as we may both know the letter A. But when I actively know or contemplate that universal form, what is now before my mind is a particular: this actualization of that universal. Now consider the primary god.

He is eternally and essentially the object of the active understanding that he is. So he is a substantial particular. But since he is essentially an activity, he is also a universal essence of a special sort—one that can only be actual, never merely potential. In a way, then, the primary god overcomes the difference between particulars and universals that seemed unbridgeable.

For he is at once a concrete particular and the starting-point of all scientific knowledge. He thereby unifies not just being, but the scientific knowledge of it as well, insuring that the latter fits the former in the way that realism requires.

The Categories 3. The Fundamental Principles: Axioms 5. What is Substance? Substance, Matter, and Subject 7. Substance and Essence 8. Substances as Hylomorphic Compounds 9. Substance and Definition Substances and Universals Substance as Cause of Being Actuality and Potentiality Unity Reconsidered Theology The Role of Substance in the Study of Being Qua Being The Categories leads us to expect that the study of being in general being qua being will crucially involve the study of substance, and when we turn to the Metaphysics we are not disappointed.

Substances and Universals At this point, we seem to have a clear idea about the nature of substantial form as Aristotle conceives of it. Theology The science of being qua being is a science of form. And to it Aristotle gives a succinct answer: If there is some immovable substance, this [that is, theological philosophy] will be prior and will be primary philosophy, and it will be universal in this way, namely, because it is primary.

And it will belong to it to get a theoretical grasp on being qua being, both what it is and the things that belong to it insofar as it is being.

For the essence, the universal, and the genus seem to be the substance of each thing, and fourth of these, the underlying subject. For if they are universal, they will not be substances. For no common thing signifies a this something but a such-and-such sort of thing, whereas substance is a this something.

But if they are not universals, but [exist] as particulars, they will not be scientifically knowable. For scientific knowledge of all things is universal. Thus there will be other starting-points prior to the starting-points, namely, those that are predicated universally, if indeed there is going to be scientific knowledge of these. There is no benefit, therefore, in positing eternal substances, as those who accept the Forms do, unless there is to be present in them some starting-point that is capable of causing change.

Moreover, even this is not enough, and neither is another substance beyond the Forms. For if it will not be active, there will not be movement. Further, even if it will be active, it is not enough, if the substance of it is a capacity. For then there will not be eternal movement, since what is potentially may possibly not be. There must, therefore, be such a starting-point, the very substance of which is activity.

Further, accordingly, these substances must be without matter. For they must be eternal, if indeed anything else is eternal. Therefore they must be activity.

And what enables them to do so, and to constitute a single heaven, is that there is a single prime mover of all of them: It is evident that there is but one heaven. For if there are many, as there are many human beings, the starting-point for each will be one in form but in number many. But all things that are many in number have matter, for one and the same account applies to many, for example, human beings, whereas Socrates is one. Plato in his theory of forms separates the sensible world appearances of the intelligible world ideas and the intelligible world was the only reality the foundation of all truth.

Just is the question What is substance. Book XII on the other hand is usually considered the culmination of Aristotles work in metaphysics and in it he offers his teleological system.

Book seven or Zeta explores the concept of Being. For Aristotle every animal by nature has this sensation sight which is a starting point for knowledge and there is some animals also which has memory and can retain what they. Chapter 7 Z are generally thought to be an interpolation. Now of all these senses which being. Some 7 again hold that the Forms and numbers have the same nature and that other thingslines and planesare dependent upon them.

But in Aristotles Metaphysics at the heart of his philosophy such separation removes any intelligibility and meaning to the. Find a summary of this and each chapter of The Metaphysics. He writes The question What is that which is. Changeable and perishable eg plants and animals changeable and eternal eg heavenly bodies and immutable.

If all substances are perishable then ultimate destruction of everything is inevitable. Aristotle argues that matter cannot be substance. A connected sequence of genuine Aristotelian text put by a later hand out of context here. This word was added to the text by later editors. Aristotle will spend some of The Metaphysics criticizing Platos notion of the Forms but the reader may note that the discussion about the existence of Forms continues to this day.

It investigates questions about substance and essence. The object of study of Metaphysics is the immaterial. The origin of the word Metaphysics is attributed to Andronicus of Rhodes , who was trying to order the books of Aristotle, but since he was unable to classify those dealing with Metaphysics within morality, logic, or physics, he chose to place them after those dealing with physics.

However, Metaphysics already existed before Aristotle , and already appeared as part of the writings of pre-Socratic philosophers or Plato himself. Our select list consists of more than 20 books on Metaphysics in PDF format. In these texts you will be able to consult all the relevant and important data on the subject.

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