Joel posted Is PowerPoint Anti-Intellectual? last month in which he claimed:"If Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had had PowerPoint available, there might not have been any western philosophy handed down to us."
I replied:
"I'm not sure what Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle would have done with PowerPoint. I guess Socrates would have avoided it. Plato would have used it grudgingly, but Aristotle -OH! ARISTOTLE- he would have been (almost) as good as me!"
Well. that remark has cost me dozens of hours during which I have been researching Aristotle's books on Physics and Meteorology and building the PowerPoint charts I think he would have created had they been available in his time, some 2300 years ago. In particular, I tried to explain Aristotle's view of the Five Elements (Aether, Air, Fire, Earth, and Water) as well as his take on the Four Causes (Material, Formal, Efficient, and Final).
MY KNOLS ON THE FIVE ELEMENTS AND THE FOUR CAUSES
Once I made the PowerPoint charts I decided to go the extra step and use them to construct two new Google Knols. The first Knol, on the Five Elements was published last month, along with a related Topic on this Blog. The other Knol, on the Four Causes, is now available for your amazement.
Like me, you may find philosophy hard to understand. As my PhD advisor (Howard Pattee) told me, philosophers make simple things complex, using a language specially created for that purpose!
MY KNOLS ON THE FIVE ELEMENTS AND THE FOUR CAUSES
Once I made the PowerPoint charts I decided to go the extra step and use them to construct two new Google Knols. The first Knol, on the Five Elements was published last month, along with a related Topic on this Blog. The other Knol, on the Four Causes, is now available for your amazement.
Like me, you may find philosophy hard to understand. As my PhD advisor (Howard Pattee) told me, philosophers make simple things complex, using a language specially created for that purpose!
You may have heard about Aristotle's four causes: Material Cause, Formal Cause, Efficient Cause and Final Cause. I couldn't understand how the words "Formal" and Efficient" applied to causes - and neither would Aristotle if he lived today.
When we say, for example, "the housing crisis caused the stock market to dive" or "investors dumped their stocks because they wanted to preserve their capital" we imply a more or less direct relationship between the cause and the event or action. The Greek word for "cause" is "aition" and it is understood in a much wider sense, including both the immediate, direct causes as well as explanitory factors.
Thus what philosophers now call the Formal Cause should be understood as the form or pattern, the essence or archetype, that explains something. What they call the Efficient Cause is what we would call the direct or immediate cause of some event.
SIMPLE EXAMPLE OF THE FOUR CAUSES
I'll start with a simple, concrete example - how do building materials such as stone and wood end up becoming a house and furniture? What are all the causes and explanitory factors?
The chart at the head of this Topic shows how the Four Causes play into each other to accomplish this transformation.
The four charts that follow trace the effect of each of these causes in a step-by-step manner. See the Knol (Four Causes) for additional detail, verbatim quotations from Aristotle, and more.
In the Knol I also get into what Aristotle called spontaneity and chance as well as the fact he understood something like evolution and natural selection 2000 years before Charles Darwin - a feact Darwin himself acknowledges!Ira Glickstein
3 comments:
Aristotle's "causes" are an interesting ambiguity of the interrogative "why." That ambiguity results in many difficulties when we are trying to communicate and no end of trouble. Let's take the inquiry, "Why is grass green?" We're asking what are the causes of a particular effect. The trouble is that it takes multiple conditions to be satisfied in order for a certain effect to be produced. Am I asking about the sensation of green that appears when I look at a blade of grass? If so, the explanation lies in the brain and the way that it the retinal sensors produce the signal stimulated by the wavelengths reflected from a blade of grass. Am I talking about the source of those wavelengths? Then the answer to "why?" is the way that a certain set of photons are emitted when an electron makes a jump. Why are those photons emitted rather than some others? The answer to why is in the nature of chlorophyl. This can go on and on obviously. One can also interpret the question as metaphysical. Why did God or Nature choose to make grass green and not say red? In the great scheme of things, is there some great plan that requires the greeness of grass?
When a child asks a long train of "why's" it's a indication of this ambiguity and the fact that an effect requires multiple parallel causes and that each cause is an effect produced by other serial causes. "Daddy, why is Momma's belly big and round?" Mom is going to have a baby. "Why is she going to have a baby?" Because she didn't take her pill. "Why didn't she take her pill? etc. etc. back to the Big Bang.
What amazes me is that during many centuries, a new set of interrogatives didn't evolve to cure this problem. Even French, which has the reputation for being the most precise of European languages has only "pourquoi" which perhaps gives us a clue, since it means both "why" and "because" in English. I'm guessing that at the time that the "wh" interrogatives (where, what, when, why, which, who) split off from their single ancestal root, the human mind did not engage in deep inquiry as to causes. One can easily imagine a primitive senario in which one asks: Where is the deer? When do I release the arrow? Which piece of carcass is my share? Who is that person? What is that? When will we eat? However, inquiring as to why a thing is so, must have come very late in human development. That kind of thinking isn't what the brain evolved to do. It may have simply been too late to define a whole set of "why's." Note that German has a related family (wo, wer, wie, was, wenn, warum). A final note in case someone wants to do a little research. I checked a online dictionary that contains both modern and ancient Greek. The word Ira gave for "why" is actually modern Greek. When I tried to find the ancient word, there was none. I wonder what that means. With respect -Joel
As usual, Joel, your comments provide more work for me (which is a compliment to you :^)
Why did I write this Topic? Because I wanted to show that Aristotle would have made good use of computer graphics (i.e., Powerpoint).
Why did I wand to demo Aristotle's use of Powerpoint? Because you posted a Topic claiming that there would have been no western civilization had Powerpoint existed in classical Greece.
Why did you post that Topic? Because you have had bad experiences with Powerpoint presentations and you found an internet site that supported your argument with examples of bad NASA charts.
Why does NASA create bad charts? Because they are a government agency.
Why do government agencies exist? Because civil service workers would not have jobs otherwise.
How many civil service people work for the government? About half of them!It is all an infinite regress unless you invoke the Deity: "Because God Created it and He wanted it to be that way"! -or- if you are a Pantheist like me: "Because the General Operating Device (GOD) of the Universe, namely evolution and natural selection of the fittest, made it that way."
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You also state: "... I checked a online dictionary that contains both modern and ancient Greek. The word Ira gave for 'why' is actually modern Greek. When I tried to find the ancient word, there was none. I wonder what that means."The Greek word aition I gave was translated as "cause" not "why". According to A History of Greek Philosophy, Guthrie, 1990, pg 223 "The word in Aristotle regularly translated 'cause' is aition or aitia ... The adjectival form aiti-os, -a, -on meant 'responsible for' ... The meaning 'cause' was already established before Aristotle, as when Herodotus at the beginning of his history promises to investigate the aitia of the war between the Greeks and the Persians. .."
This is "all Greek to me" since I do not read Greek, but I am confident that the ancient Greeks used the words aitios, aitia, aition in a wider sense than our modern "cause", to include "explanitory factors". I find Aristotle's four causes that we now call Material, Formal, Efficient, and Final are comprehensive and useful for understanding the physical and mental world to the extent we mere mortals are privileged to do so.
Ira Glickstein
Ira said: You (Joel) also state: "... I checked a online dictionary that contains both modern and ancient Greek. The word Ira gave for 'why' is actually modern Greek. When I tried to find the ancient word, there was none. I wonder what that means."The Greek word aition I gave was translated as "cause" not "why". According to A History of Greek Philosophy, Guthrie, 1990, pg 223 "The word in Aristotle regularly translated 'cause' is aition or aitia ... The adjectival form aiti-os, -a, -on meant 'responsible for' ... The meaning 'cause' was already established before Aristotle, as when Herodotus at the beginning of his history promises to investigate the aitia of the war between the Greeks and the Persians. .."
This is "all Greek to me" since I do not read Greek, but I am confident that the ancient Greeks used the words aitios, aitia, aition in a wider sense than our modern "cause", to include "explanatory factors". I find Aristotle's four causes that we now call Material, Formal, Efficient, and Final are comprehensive and useful for understanding the physical and mental world to the extent we mere mortals are privileged to do so.
Joel responds: Thanks for giving me more work (in a good way). You're right about "aition." It is ancient Greek. I didn't understand how to use the online dictionary properly.
http://www.foreignword.com/Tools/dictsrch_aff.asp?menu=N&query=why&src=BP&go=Translate&trg=CQ
Here's what I got for "cause."
(Found 26 entries matching: cause
English Translation Original Word Transliterated Word
1223 for this cause diav dia
1223 because diav dia
1352 for which cause diov dio
1360 because diovti dioti
1360 because that diovti dioti
1432 without a cause dwreavn dorean
1500 without a cause eijkh'/ eike
156 cause aijtiva aitia
158 cause ai[tion aition
1752 for ... cause e&neka heneka
1752 because e&neka heneka
1893 because ejpeiv epei
1894 because ejpeidhv epeide
2289 cause to be put to death qanatovw thanatoo
2358 cause to triumph qriambeuvw thriambeuo
2530 because kaqovti kathoti
2716 cause katergavzomai katergazomai
3076 cause grief lupevw lupeo
3704 because o&pwß hopos
3754 because o&ti hoti
4160 cause poievw poieo
473 because ajntiv anti
473 for ... cause ajntiv anti
5124 for this cause tou'to touto
5484 for this cause cavrin charin
5484 because of cavrin charin
The word "why" also has many translations, but no qualifiers. The last column is the English transliteration. The number are some kind of biblical reference.
1063 why gavr gar
1223 why diav dia
1223 why* diav dia
1352 why diov dio
1519 why* eijß eis
2400 why ijdouv idou
2443 why* i&na hina
2444 why iJnativ hinati
3739 why* o&ß hos
4459 why pw'ß pos
5101 why tivß tis
5101 why* tivß tis
I don't think that we can say that Aristotle's "causes" are comprehensive. Looking at the list of Greek translations gives us the notion that there are other possibilities. For example, creating divisions is a causative act with it's own Greek word. Committing a crime is a causative act. Creating emotions in another person is a causative act. To cause someone else to commit an act is a causative act.
Finally, I'd like to get to the Powerpoint issue. The article I originally referred concerning NASA slides and the PP presentation was complaining that the technique is too powerful. It tends to be too convincing and prevents the members of the audience from rebelling. It's a kind of brainwashing that papers over possible cracks. If I wasn't already familiar with Aristotle's four types of cause and didn't already have some doubts, perhaps I would accept the PP presentation without question. That would be a bad thing. With respect -Joel
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