The Supposed Material Cause in Posterior Analytics 2.11

What is it about?

The concept of matter comes into Western Philosophy and science through Aristotle's four types of cause: form, matter, mover, and end. In what is probably the first passage where Aristotle distinguishes four causes, the spot usually occupied by matter is either occupied by very strange description of matter, or a description of something else, but it is not clear what. I show that Aristotle is not in fact referring to matter, but to a form of explanation by appeal to a thing's more general features or more basic facts, as when we explain that a given type of triangle has angles summing to 180º because all triangles do. There are some interesting and plausible connections between this type of explanation and Aristotle's notion of matter, but they are not the same. This means that the story of how the concept of matter was introduced into Western philosophy and science is more complicated—and probably owes more to debates within and with Plato and the Academy—than many have thought.

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