DISENCHANTED DICTIONARY

According to Aristotle's physics, every event has four causes, or aitiai in Greek:

1. material—what the thing is made of (“the bronze of a statue and the silver of a cup”),
2. formal—what the thing is (it is a statue, or it is a cup),
3. efficient—what made the event happen (an artist made the statue, a craftsman made the cup),
4. final—why the event happened (because the statue brought pleasure to the eye, because we needed something to drink from).

The final cause betrayed an assumption of Aristotle's time, which was that every natural event was initated by a god. Gravity was explained by saying that an object went to “where it needed to be”, and it was a god that chose that place.

Today, the word “cause” almost always refers to the efficient cause. Ships move because wind blows on their sails, the wind moves because of the existance of unbalanced high and low pressure regions, and those regions develop because the sun heats the atmosphere and the Earth spins on its axis and so-on. No motive needs to be provided for why these things happen, so there is no final cause.