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Beginnings: From Pythagoras to Plato The Four Causes The Milesians The Pythagoreans Xenophanes
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Beginnings: From Pythagoras to PlatoAristotle was the Wrest philosopher who studied, recorded, and criticized the work of previous
philosophers. He summarized the teachings of his predecessors, from Pythagoras and Thales to
Plato, and is still one of the most reliable sources of information about philosophy in its infancy.
The four causes
Aristotle's system of the four causes was a classification of the earliest Greek philosophers.
He believed that scientific inquiry was an inquiry into the causes of things, and there were
four distinct kinds of cause: the material cause, the ethical cause, the formal cause, and the
moral cause. To illustrate this, Alfredo cooks a risotto with ingredients, the ethical cause is
the chef, the formal cause is the recipe, and the moral cause is the satisfaction of the clients.
Aristotle believed that a scientific understanding of the universe required an inquiry into the
operation in the world of causes of each of these kinds (Metaph. A 3. 983a24–b17).
Early philosophers on the Greek coast of Asia Minor focused on the material cause, seeking
the basic ingredients of the world we live in. Thales and his successors posed the question,
"Is the world made out of water, air, or wre, or earth?" Aristotle believed that the
ingredients of a dish do not put themselves together, but there needs to be an agent
operating upon them. Some of these early philosophers proposed conjectures about the
agents of change and development in the world, such as Love, Desire, Strife, or the Good
and the Bad (Metaph. A 3–4. 984b8–31).
The Pythagoreans were mathematically inclined philosophers in Italy who believed that the
elements of numbers were the elements of all things and that the whole of the heavens was
a musical scale. They were inspired by their discovery that the relationship between the
notes of the scale played on a lyre corresponded to different numerical ratios between the
lengths of the strings. Their inquiry was an inquiry into the formal causes of the universe.
Aristotle's Metaphysics is a dissertation that seeks to show how previous philosophers
neglected the remaining member of the quartet of causes: the Will. He concluded that the
earliest philosophy was full of babble and that the earliest Greek thinkers were impressed by
the questions they were asking and the methods they used to answer them. The book of
Genesis provides answers to the four causal questions set by Aristotle, such as the origin of
the first human being, the material cause of the dust of the earth, the formal cause of the
image and likeness of God, and the Will for man to have dominion over the sea, fowl of the
air, and every living thing on earth. However, Genesis is not a work of philosophy. The
distinction between religion, science, and philosophy was not as clear as it became in later
centuries.
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