Four Causes

Four Causes is the Aristotelian doctrine that a complete explanation of anything requires four distinct types of answer: what it is made of (material cause), what structure organizes it (formal cause), what produced it (efficient cause), and what end or goal it serves (final cause). This is not a theory of physics but a theory of explanation — a framework insisting that reductive accounts capturing only one cause-type are necessarily incomplete. The doctrine underlies Aristotle's entire metaphysics and was systematically suppressed by the Scientific Revolution's decision to recognize only efficient causation as legitimate, a narrowing whose consequences for explanatory pluralism we are only now beginning to recover.