Formal, Teleological, and Efficient Causality

While Kant reduces Teleological Causality to Efficient, his system implicitly recognizes another of the traditional types as more fundamental than either of those two--Formal Causality. For, as perhaps Cassirer best recognizes, the Form-Matter distinction is primary and pervasive throughout the system, though Kant never explicitly formulates a definition of Formal Causality. Nevertheless, such a definition is easily gleaned from the perhaps most important of the system's notions, namely Synthesis. For, the Form-Matter relation is regularly represented as a Unity-Multiplicity relation, and Synthesis is the unification of a multiplicity. Hence, the system implies a definition of Formal Causality as the 'unification of a multiplicity', the fundamentality of which is evident insofar as Teleological Causality and Efficient Causality are each unifications of a manifold of experiential data.