#final cause

[the-ephemeral-ethereal]

Nature has not set herself an aim or end, and all final causes are nothing more than human fictions and inventions.

from Ethics by Benedict Spinoza

[perkwunos]

“According to this explanation, self-determination is always imaginative in its origin. The deterministic efficient causation is the inflow of the actual world in its own proper character of its own feelings, with their own intensive strength, felt and re-enacted by the novel concrescent subject. But this re-enaction has a mere character of conformation to pattern. The subjective valuation is the work of novel conceptual feeling; and in proportion to its importance, acquired in complex processes of integration and reintegration, this autonomous conceptual element modifies the subjective forms throughout the whole range of feeling in that concrescence and thereby guides the integrations.”

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Part III, Chapter III, Section I

[tonreihe]

“And lastly let us take the ugliness of ordinary trousers as an example of the lack of harmony between Formal and Final Causes.” (Graham Carey, “The Majority Report on Art”)

[cloakedmonk]

Ain't Got A Prayer

Ain’t Got A Prayer

If there were more Christians and Christian ministers like the Rev. Terri Stewart, there is a pretty good chance — who knows for sure?  — that I would still be one, too. And if there were more monotheistslike Terri, it is a pretty safe bet that — while there no guarantees — I most likely would not, as I presently do, regard monotheistic religion as a malignant canker on the arse of human…

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[colorsatthealley]

At the end we all die, that's our final cause

Eduardo Agredano

[phxlosophy]

Exam Question: Explain what is Aristotle meant by "final cause" (25 marks)

Aristotle's ideas on causation and the four causes

how they fit with Aristotle's understanding of reality

the importance of the final cause

[evokit-notes]

Spinoza radically rejected final causa­tion [an end, aim or purpose] as an anthropomorphic fiction. Ideas of purpose are derived from our tendency to act with an end in view. From this habit we incline to look at the universe as though it too had a purpose. But it is utterly wrong to look at ourselves and at the universe in this way. "This opinion alone would have been sufficient to keep the human race in darkness to all eternity if mathematics, which does not deal with ends but with the essences and proper­ties of forms, had not placed before us another rule of truth" ([1677] 1949, 74).

[bygone]