Abstract

Few ideas in the history of philosophy have come in for the sustained criticism meted out to Aristotle’s notion of final causation. According to Aristotle and the scholastics, final causes are not just one kind of cause among many, but the very ‘cause of causes’. To appreciate the connection between final causes and efficient causes, it is useful to gather a few reminders of the Aristotelian approach to causation in general. The Aristotelian notion of causation in general has two essential components: a cause is that on which something depends in itself, and a cause is a principle in itself influencing being in another. For the scholastics, the effort to understand the natural order is in large part a matter of identifying these causes in the phenomenon under investigation. For final causes in cases of human agency are, in the last analysis, only ens rationis, namely, beings of reason.