...a.) Aristotle’s Theory of The Four Causes. Aristotle argues for and explains the four causes in his books ‘Physics’ and ‘Metaphysics’. He claims that there are only four causes (or explanations) needed to give evidence for change in the world. A complete explanation of the change of any object will use all four causes. These causes are; material, formal, efficient and final. Aristotle understood that each of the four causes was necessary to explain the change from potentiality to actuality. The material cause is the substance of which something is made out of; "That from which, as a constituent, an object comes into being." The human bodies ‘material causes’ are cells, skin and tissue. A computer’s ‘material cause’ would be its pixels and electronic components. Aristotle used the example of a bronze sculpture or a silver saucer. Bronze or silver, in this case, would be the material cause. The material cause is also a question scientists try and answer when they examine a specimen; they discover what it is made from. The material cause explains the general properties of an object. For example, the human body needs oxygen because its cells need oxygen, and a computer needs electricity because the electronic components need electricity to fuel them. Finally, the material cause can be split into two sectors: proximate matter and prime matter. Proximate matter is matter that has some working properties, such as cells and electronic components. Prime matter has no...
Words: 1432 - Pages: 6
...between 384-322 BC. The final cause was the most important aspect of Aristotle’s theory. It was the theory that all objects have an ultimate reason for their existence. Aristotle proves this through his four causes; the material, formal, efficient and final cause. The final cause is the most important as the material, efficient and formal causes would be pointless under logical without a final cause. When we do something, it is for a reason. Aristotle believed in the notions of cause and effect. His interest was to explain ‘why’ things exist as they do. However, he rejected the idea that things which exist in some way that imitate an ideal Form (he rejected Plato’s ideas). He identified four types of cause that make something what it is. This interest led Aristotle to suggest that there are four different types of cause or explanation of why any object exists. The Four causes provide answers for Aristotle. The Material cause, ‘what it is made from?’, this refers to the matter or substance something is made from. The second cause is the Formal cause, ‘what is its Form or essence?’, e.g. a chair is what it is because it is in a Form of a chair. For Aristotle the Form is in the chair and each chair has its own Form. The third cause is, ‘what produced it?’, the Efficient cause, this refers to the cause of an object or thing existing. In other words, the answer to why the things exist. The first three causes exist only as a necessary means for the fulfillment of the final cause. Without...
Words: 804 - Pages: 4
...his ideas and thoughts that is why he did not agree with some of the ideas of his guru and even with the other philosophers like Parmenides’ arguments. Plato believed in the world of ideas, for him the idea and the form were real. However, For Aristotle the individual things were real, he believed in the world of reality. Since he believed in the world of reality, he saw on this earth many beings so he called them as substances. Aristotle says, “The substance is a unity of form and matter. Substances undergo two types of changes: accidental and radical.” [2] Since he spoke about changes, there was a clash between Parmenides and Aristotle. The Greek philosopher Parmenides said, “Reality is one and stable,” [3] that means there cannot be any change. In other words, “In reality there is no change at all; all change is mere appearance; because reality is one, which is unchanging.” [4] Because Parmenides believed that there are only two possibilities, they are ‘being’ and ‘non-being’. According to Parmenides if there is something then only something comes out and if there is nothing how can you expect something? The problem was that later he said that from being no being comes because He has no idea of potentiality in being. However, Aristotle says, every being has potentiality therefore there is change in everything. Since Aristotle said about the change, he had to bring out the proper arguments. Therefore, He began to explain by giving theory of four causes and the problem of change...
Words: 1615 - Pages: 7
...Aristotle's Views on Nature, Knowledge, and Being Aristotle was a realist and a scientific thinker. He dealt with attempting to explain the world around him, using evidence that could be derived from the senses. Unlike his predecessors, Aristotle organized his thought more collectively. He described the being, relating to both living things and inanimate objects, as the state of essential substance, one definite characteristic. According to Aristotle, that being is changed by any number of things, including growth, modification, destruction, quality, even negation. In addition to that beings in Aristotle's theory can be primary while still having secondary caracteristics to describe the “that”(i.e. What is that? A baby deer”. Unlike plato where a being is refered to as a “form” and “this”. Aristotle's view on knowledge, and the attainment of such wisdom, also differed from his predecessors. In addition to that his views on the soul were very different from those that came before him. Aristotle believed that the soul was a part of the body's make up that did not live on after death. However, he beleieved that the soul was the essence of the being that is created through the living experiences of that human. For example, a good person would be said to have a good soul, and after death the good soul does not move on to a paradise called heaven, but it rather dies along with the body. According to our notes and Aristotle's text on the soul (psuchē),” the soul is the form...
Words: 1411 - Pages: 6
...Chapter I The Problem and Review of Related Literature Introduction Man is a rational being who feels emotions. Our emotions make up a part if not most of our humanity. It can be also called passions like how it was used in antiquity. One of these emotions is love. To feel love and to reciprocate it is proper to rational beings such as the human person. But the term “love” has taken quite different meanings around the globe, a lot of persons even have their own notion of love. It is the one of the most elusive and abused term of mankind. It eludes definition for the reason that one really cannot exhaust love in one specific definition. As Benedict XVI said (2006, p. 7) “In our present context, the term “love” has become one of the most frequently used and misused of words, a word where we attach quite different meanings.” We human persons are capable of expressing and accepting love, since we are endowed with intellect and will aside from our passions. These faculties make it possible for a human to feel being loved and to love back in return. The faculty intellect is the one that perceives and comprehends love, where we can interpret it, while the faculty of the will is the one that is responsible for conveying and reciprocating love. Our acts as human beings such as loving are very much different from those of the animals’. This is because human acts require the use of both the intellect and the will. It requires knowing and willing a particular act, making...
Words: 5565 - Pages: 23
...demonstrate the immortality of the soul. Plato defends a clear ontological dualism in which there are two types of realities or worlds: the sensible world and the intelligible world or, as he calls it, the world of the Ideas. The Sensible World is the world of individual realities, and so is multiple and constantly changing, is the world of generation and destruction; is the realm of the sensible, material, temporal and space things. On the contrary, the Intelligible World is the world of the universal, eternal and invisible realities called Ideas (or "Forms"), which are immutable and do not change because they are not material, temporal or space. Ideas can be understood and known; they are the authentic reality. The Ideas or Forms are not just concepts or psychic events of our minds; they do exist as objective and independent beings out of our consciences. They are also the origin of sensible things, but although they are the authentic beings, Plato, unlike Parmenides of Elea, do not completely deny the reality of the sensible things; the sensible world, although ontologically inferior, have also certain kind of being which comes from its participation or imitation of the world of Forms. The task of Demiurge is to give the shape of the Forms to that shapeless sensible material that has always existed making it thus similar to the Ideas. The Ideas are hierarchically...
Words: 11604 - Pages: 47
...century Greece was in a philosophical crisis. It was a crisis in morality. In our culture we think of morality as being concerned with rules. Here are some rules – You should not kill. – You should not steal. – Don’t hit people. – Lying is wrong. – It’s wrong to promise to do something and then not do it. – You should not covet your neighbors wife, or his ox or his ass or his male or female slave, or anything that is your neighbor’s. – You should not lie with a man as with a woman. – Thou should not wear fabric woven of wool one way and linen the other. – Do (imperative) unto others as you would have them do unto you. – Help (imperative) other people who are in need when you can do so at no great risk or cost to yourself. Why do we think of morality as consisting of rules? This question is important because rule-morality has one bad consequence. (This does not mean that rule-based morality is false or misguided.) The bad effect is that people who break rules sometimes advantage themselves by doing so. We say that “cheaters never prosper.” But is that a credible induction from your experience? Rule morality can make morality appear to be an irksome restriction on pursuit of our...
Words: 28769 - Pages: 116
...Introduction Philosophy and religion have always dealt with the same questions. What is real? How do we know what we believe is real is real? How important are these things that I believe to be real to my existence? Many different philosophers have answered these questions in many different ways as people in today’s society would answer it in different ways as well. Some believe that God, for example, is real. Others believe that the world as we know it can be explained through science, and science alone. First we will look at what Aristotle, one of the early philosophers, view on metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory and then look at a current century way of viewing the world. Chapter 1 Aristotle - Biography Aristotle was born in 384 BCE. at Stagirus, a Greek colony and seaport on the coast of Thrace. His father Nichomachus was court physician to King Amyntas of Macedonia, and from this began Aristotle's long association with the Macedonian Court, which considerably influenced his life. At age 17 his guardian, Proxenus, sent him to Athens, the intellectual center of the world, to complete his education. He joined the Academy and studied under Plato, attending his lectures for a period of twenty years. In the later years of his association with Plato and the Academy he began to lecture on his own account, especially on the subject of rhetoric. At the death of Plato in 347, the pre-eminent ability of Aristotle would seem to have designated him to succeed to the...
Words: 2136 - Pages: 9
...Miletus Thales of Miletus has always been one of my favourite philosopher. Although at first, I knew him through mathematic books I have read when I was at the primary school, but once I see his profile on philosophy, his thoughts became more and more interesting, which is why I chose him for this philosophy project. Thales of Miletus, was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor (Anatolia) and one of the Seven Sages of Greece (or Seven Wise Men). He was born estimated 624 BC and died estimated at 546 BC. A lot of people, especially Aristotle, claimed him to be the first philosopher in Greek tradition. He is well-known for his hypothesis that all matters in this world is originated from one substance: water. He was also the first to define general principles and set forth hypotheses, and as a result has been called the "Father of Science”. Besides being the first Greek philosopher and called as the “Father of Science”, Thales also considered as “the first Greek mathematicians”. He once used geometry to solve problems such as calculating the height of pyramids and the distance of ships from the shore. He is credited with the first use of deductive reasoning applied to geometry, by deriving four analogies to Thales' Theorem. As a result, he has been called as the first true mathematician and is the first known individual to whom a mathematical discovery has been attributed. Thales Theorem states that if A, B and C are points on a circle where the line AC is a diameter...
Words: 848 - Pages: 4
...character. Morality has to do with our moral judgments, principles, values, and theories. Ethics is the careful examination of morality and applies critical reason to questions about what we should do and what is of value. Morality is a public system that understood and applied to all rational people. Values expressed in our thoughts, feelings, action, and perceptions. It is a quality of a thing which makes it desirable, useful, or an objective interest. It assesses the worth of something. Moral refers to the individual conduct itself, conform the accepted what is considered right pertaining to the manner in which one behaves in relationship with the others. Immoral refers to something that is contrary to moral Amoral is without morals, an individual taking an action without any consider to commitment to moral or social concept of good or bad. Evil is the idea that sad things happen to people and people do bad things. Etiquette: rules of behavior nothing to do with moral or ethics/ violating the social system, and it is a code of behavior of a society. Law is a rule or a body of rules established by the authority, society or custom. Laws are supposed to reflect morality. Value judgment: assess or work on something Intrinsic value is a value of a thing for its own sake, value for itself. Extrinsic Value: a value of a thing because it is a means for something else, Ex, for a show, low level value. Normative ethics, typical, average, investigating moral theory, in attempt...
Words: 2159 - Pages: 9
...Aristotle, trusted that deliberation is a procedure that happens in the human personality. A man, subsequent to seeing numerous material articles, for example, a wicker bin ball, will have the capacity to extract the general type of the item, along these lines having the capacity to build the conceptual thought of a b-ball in their brain, which would be a procedure done by the "dynamic mind". Aquinas developed Aristotle's thoughts of the astuteness and how we comprehend data. Aquinas contended that the brains comprehend "ghosts", or inside duplicates of what we see, by abstracting. The "aloof keenness" is the part of the insightfulness that knows material protests, what Aquinas accepted is the means by which we know all items. To comprehend ghosts, we require the detached brains to comprehend what we are seeing. The dynamic judgment is the part of the acumen ready to digest from learning of the inactive. Both Aquinas and Augustine concur upon the way that God is the object of extreme learning. The logicians would see eye to eye on the way that one can know God through reason, while nobody can know or comprehend God completely in light of the fact that man is however God's creation. While both of these scholars and rationalists kept up goals extraordinarily affected by Christianity, they both accommodated their convictions in altogether different ways. Augustine was all that much impacted by Plato, though Aquinas was guided seriously by Aristotle. The old scholars had...
Words: 2175 - Pages: 9
...Jessica Salinas Theories of Morality Throughout the evolutionary process of rules and regulations that we abide by, we come to a discrete conclusion that "morality" has complete power over our beings. Morality is the quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct. The installation of a moral system is vital in every society. Yet, every moral system must deal with the major conflicting general moral issues: Consequentialism versus Non-consequentialism; Self versus Other-Interestedness; Act Utilitarianism versus Rule Utilitarianism; and Emotion versus reason as well as others. The approaches that are used to deal with these issues are up to the person which dilemma or situation is best fitted. In order to use one of these methods you have to understand these theories and their purposes. Immanuel Kant was a dominant philosopher of his time (1724-1804), the theory of Kant is the most difficult to understand but when understood is a simple approach. Kant argues that “the moral worth of an action is to be judged not by its consequences but by the nature of the maxim or principal that motivated the action”(Cahn pg. 98). The only actions that are correct are the ones that can serve as universal laws. People should act only on principles or maxims that can be universalized without contradiction. Another theory that is the theory of a leading English philosopher known as John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), his theory differentiates between Kant’s in that...
Words: 1861 - Pages: 8
...acceleration for the same force. Matter is thus a general term for the substance of which all observable physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles that have mass, but this definition confuses mass and matter, which are not the same. Different fields use the term in different and sometimes incompatible ways; there is no single agreed scientific meaning of the word "matter," even though the term "mass" is better-defined. Common definition The common definition of matter is anything that has both mass and volume (occupies space). For example, a car would be said to be made of matter, as it occupies space, and has mass. The observation that matter occupies space goes back to antiquity. However, an explanation for why matter occupies space is recent, and is argued to be a result of the Pauli exclusion principle. Two particular examples where the exclusion principle clearly relates matter to the occupation of space are white dwarf stars and neutron stars, discussed further below. Atoms and molecules definition A definition of "matter" that is based upon its physical and chemical structure is: matter is made up of atoms and molecules. As an example, deoxyribonucleic acid molecules (DNA) are matter under this definition because they are made of atoms. This definition can be extended to include charged atoms and molecules, so as to include plasmas (gases of ions) and electrolytes (ionic solutions), which are not obviously included in the atoms and molecules...
Words: 2043 - Pages: 9
...THE IMPACT OF ORGANIZATIONAL POLITICS ON THE WORK OF THE INTERNAL HUMAN RESOURCE PROFESSIONAL by Julie A. Paleen Aronow A Research Paper Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Master of Science Degree in Training and Development Approved: 4 Semester Credits Dr. Kat Lui The Graduate College University of Wisconsin – Stout May, 2004 ii The Graduate School University of Wisconsin – Stout Menomonie, WI 54751 ABSTRACT Aronow Julie Ann Paleen ________________________________________________________________________ (Last Name) (First) (Middle) THE IMPACT OF ORGANIZATIONAL POLITICS ON THE WORK OF THE INTERNAL HUMAN RESOURCE PROFESSIONAL ________________________________________________________________________ (Title) Training and Development Dr. Kat Lui May 2004 65 ________________________________________________________________________ (Graduate Major) (Research Advisor) (Month/Year) (No. of Pages) American Psychological Association, 5th Edition ________________________________________________________________________ (Name of Style Manual Used in this Study) The coveted epicenter for the contemporary human resource professional is partnering with other internal business leaders to fulfill the organization’s mission through sound and ethical business principles and human resource practices. Over three decades, the discipline has matured into one that includes transactional practices along side the more sophisticated organizational development...
Words: 16734 - Pages: 67
...particular things and forming them into universal ideas. Moreover, the problem of how we know things had been one of the major preoccupations of philosophers over the ages. The ostensive problem raised in an attempt to find out where human knowledge comes from has led to diverse views. Some believe that human knowledge comes from experience and that human beings are born tabula rasa. Others believe that human beings do not acquire knowledge from experience; rather human beings are born with knowledge which is called the innate ideas. In this essay, we intend to look into Thomas Aquinas’ views about abstraction. We shall do this as one should in philosophy by employing the tool of conceptual clarification. We will first attempt a definition of the meaning of the term abstraction and the types of abstraction. This will serve as a springboard for our exploration into the basic thought of Aquinas on the theory of abstraction. Second, we shall carry out a holistic examination of Aquinas theory of abstraction. Finally, we will conclude. 1. ABSTRACTION: A CONCEPTUAL ELUCIDATION. In ordinary language abstraction designates the attitude of someone who is detached from everyday life and does not account what is real. In Philosophy the term abstraction designates a specific operation of the intellect consisting of detaching and retaining some property from a thing. This property serves as the basis upon which the intellect forms a cognitive image or concept of a thing. ...
Words: 3416 - Pages: 14
