From Aristotle’s Four Causes to Aquinas’ Ultimate Causes of Being: Modern Interpretations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary: Over time, Aristotle’s theory of four causes lost some of their original flexibility as an instrument to be applied analogically in diverse sciences. Enrico Berti’s distinction between physical and metaphysical causality in Aristotle provides insight into overcoming this crystallization. More importantly, the novelty of Aquinas’ metaphysics of actus essendi calls for a revision of the four causes: first, actus essendi is presented as actuating act and the source of the finite being’s ordered operation; the substantial essence falls to potency and specifies the act of being; the efficient cause is the power of God insofar as he produces and moves the creature; divine exemplar causality is twofold (divine ideas as extrinsic measuring causes and divine nature as imitated); the final causality concerns both the order and the governance of the world. In this paper, then, I outline this analogical passage from Aristotle’s physical causality to Aquinas’ metaphysical causality in reference to their modern interpreters, like Enrico Berti and Jan A. Aertsen. Sommario: Col tempo, la teoria di Aristotele delle quattro cause ha perso un po’ della sua flessibilita originaria come uno strumento da essere applicato in modo analogico in diverse scienze. La distinzione fra una causalita fisica e una causalita metafisica in Aristotele fatta da Enrico Berti ci offre una via per superare questa cristalizzazione. Anzi, la novita della metafisica dell’Aquinate di actus essendi esige una rivisione delle quattro cause: in primo luogo, l’actus essendi si presenta come atto attuante e come la fonte dell’operazione ordinata dell’ente finito; l’essenza sostanziale cade a potenza e specifica l’atto di essere; la causa eficiente e la potenza divina in quanto produce e muove la creatura; la causalita divina esemplare e doppia (le idee di-vine come cause misuranti estrinseci e la natura divina come imitata); la causalita finale verte sull’ordine e sul governo del mondo. In questo articolo, quindi, presento una bozza di questo passaggio analogico dalla causalita fisica aristotelica e la causalita metafisica tomistia, facendo riferimento agli interpreti moderni, come Enrico Berti e Jan A. Aertsen.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".