The Four Causes (BPC)

(Aristotle's four causes reconceptualized.)

Just as there are four conditioning connections, there are four species of causes warranting special attention:

1. Material Cause: A material conditioning connection between an entity's matter and its actions. In other words, the kind of stuff something is made of affects the way it acts. If a steel sword clashes with an iron sword, it has a chance of breaking the iron sword.

2. Formal Cause: A formal conditioning connection between an entity's form and its actions. In other words, the relationship between an entity's constituents conditions how the entity will act. In the case of isomers, different arrangements of atoms led to different actions, namely different ways that these compounds chemically interact with other chemicals.

One purpose of these two categories is to help direct the scientist's attention towards important questions. If we ask, "what is the formal cause of chemical reactions," then the case of isomers would actually show us that the spatial arrangement of atoms in a molecule plays a key role in why certain chemicals will or won't react with others. Now, why is that? . . . I don't know. But, thanks to the concept of formal cause, finding out is now on my to-do list. So it guided my attention towards a questioning worthy of answering.

Scientists can also ask, "what is the material cause of chemical reactions." It is of course, the different kinds of atoms involved in a reaction. This can prompt us to go further and ask, "okay, well if different atoms cause different reactions the what is it about those atoms which causes different reactions." These questions often arise naturally, but with explicitly formulated broad physical categories, we can now raise these questions systematically—we can remember to raise all of them, to cover them all, and to mine them all for additional data.

3. Efficient Cause: A conditioning connection between the actions of a first entity and the properties of a second entity. A block of marble has the shape it has because of the actions taken by the sculptor(this is the same example Aristotle gave and this concept was not changed from his original conception).

4. Passive Cause: A conditioning connection between the properties of a first entity and the ways its other properties will change when subject to the actions of a second entity. Iif a man is in good health, he might survive poisons that would kill others. His health, a property, therefore conditions how the poison changes his other properties, such as being alive or dead.

In physics, elasticity is a passive cause, becasue it is a property which causally conditions the amount a body deforms when subject to a force. Electric charge is another passive cause, because it is a property which causally conditions the amount of force a body receives when subject to an electric field.

[...] these concepts are helpful because the actions which create an entity often reveal aspects of its identity. When we ask "what is the efficient cause of chemical compounds," or "what kinds of actions cause them to form," we might notice that some reactions are endothermic. This means that they consume heat from their environment when taking place.

Since heat is the motion of particles involved in the reaction, and since chemical reactions are the breaking of some atomic bonds and the formation of other bonds, this allows us to infer that atomic bonds actually contain energy. Since the energy of motion is fused up into the formation of such compounds, we say that the bonds contain energy. Now, I don't exactly know what it means for atomic bonds to create energy, but thanks to the concept of efficient cause, I intend to find out.