Aristotle's Four Causes of Action

Bryan C. Reece

DOI:10.1080/00048402.2018.1482932

Corpus ID: 172010122

Aristotle's Four Causes of Action

@article{Reece2019AristotlesFC,
  title={Aristotle's Four Causes of Action},
  author={Bryan C. Reece},
  journal={Australasian Journal of Philosophy},
  year={2019},
  volume={97},
  pages={213 - 227}
}

Bryan C. Reece

Published 2019

Philosophy

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

ABSTRACT Aristotle's typical procedure is to identify four causes of natural changes. Intentional action, a natural change, has standardly been treated as an exception: most think that Aristotle has the standard causalist account, according to which an intentional action is a bodily movement efficiently caused by an attitude of the appropriate sort. I show that action is not an exception to Aristotle's typical procedure: he has the resources to specify four causes of action, and thus to… CONTINUE READING

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