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Description
Flashcards by Izzy Noone, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by Izzy Noone
almost 7 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| What kind of philosopher is Plato? | A rationalist- uses reason and logical deductions as his primary means of finding out about the world |
| What did Plato believe about sense experience? | It is unreliable and if reason gives us evidence to contradict sense experience, then reason should be preferred. |
| What kind of philosopher was Aristotle? | He was an empiricist- he believed that we should trust sense experience over reason. |
| How did Aristotle believe the whole physical world could be explained? | In terms of four causes |
| What are Aristotle's Four Causes? | The material cause The formal cause The efficient cause The final cause |
| What is the material cause? | What the object or thing is made of. The material cause of a statue is marble or bronze. |
| What is the formal cause? | The blueprint which guides the thing towards its realisation. It could be the mould in the mind of the creator or the intrinsic developmental principle embodied in the matter itself (an oak tree is inherent in an acorn). |
| What is the efficient cause? | The process which brings the thing to completion (eg. the growth of the acorn). |
| What is the final cause? | Why the thing comes to be (eg. an oak tree grows in order to produce more acorns, produce timber, please the eye, etc). |
| Why can the final cause be seen as controversial? | It suggests that Aristotle has a teleological view of reality and modern science tends to reject teleology. |
| How do people usually illustrate the four causes? | Using an analogy of a statue |
| What are "brute facts"? | The idea that some things or facts are can be explained through the phrase, "they just are". |
| Did Aristotle believe in the idea of "brute facts"? | No- "Nature does nothing in vain" |
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