Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Material Cause and Material Principle

To avoid confusion with Aristotle's very different long-established concept of the same name, what has been called here "Material Cause" will instead be termed 'Material Principle'.  Correspondingly, the inverse process will be termed the 'Formal Principle', though it has more in common with Aristotle's Formal Cause that the Material Principle has with his Material Cause.  This use of 'Matter' might be historically eccentric, but it accurately reflects the Unity-Multiplicity connotation of the traditional Form-Matter contrast.  It also avails Aristotle a systematic grounding of his attribution of the production of particulars to Active Mind.

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