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Aristotle considers nature, art, spontaneity, luck, necessity, and intelligence to be causes, and they fit into the four kinds of cause that he distinguishes throughout works on natural philosophy. The four kinds of cause, e.g. matter, mover, form, end, are not themselves causes, but are classes of causes. The causes can be combined in various ways, and the same thing can be classified as several kinds of cause. Causes play a crucial role in scientific demonstration: the middle term in a syllogism of natural science. But only intrinsic (as opposed to incidental) causes can play this role, and so it is important to distinguish between things that happen to be predicated of a cause (such as paleness of a the sculptor), and things essential to a cause (such as the art of sculpture). Due attention to these distinctions can show how Aristotle thinks that various causes can be integrated (such as ends and movers) in a way that is still explanatory, and how causation does not violate temporal sequence, requiring “backwards causation”.

This chapter examines the way Aristotle describes in A 3–4 (984b8–985a29) the reasons and motivations, which, on his interpretation, lead his predecessors to introduce a new type of principle that could function as the efficient cause. By bringing in parallel texts from Physics I and On the Parts of Animals I, it is argued that, for Aristotle, the trajectory of the discovery of the truth is after all less deterministic than what the language of Metaphysics A 3 might suggest. The paper aims to show, moreover, that what is discovered is not so much new types of Aristotelian causes but rather distinctions among types of principle.

In his discussion of the four causes, Aristotle claims that ‘the hypotheses are material causes of the conclusion’ (Physics 2. 3, MetaphysicsΔ‎ 2). This claim has puzzled commentators since antiquity. It is usually taken to mean that the premisses of any deduction are material causes of the conclusion. By contrast, I argue that the claim does not apply to deductions in general but only to scientific demonstrations. For Aristotle, the theorems of a given science are composites consisting of the indemonstrable premisses from which they are demonstrated. Accordingly, these premisses are elements, and hence material causes, of the theorems. In this way, Aristotle’s claim can be shown to be well motivated and illuminating.