Substance and what it means to be › Knowledge Beyond a List of Facts

Book I.1–3 gives the inquiry its direction. Aristotle begins with the human desire to know. He distinguishes experience of particular cases from understanding the reason why they happen. Someone may know from experience that a treatment helped several patients; the person with the relevant art understands a general explanatory account. The contrast concerns explanatory knowledge, rather than a dismissal of experience.

Wisdom, in this discussion, seeks first principles and causes. Aristotle also presents philosophical inquiry as arising from wonder and being pursued for understanding itself. This matters for the reader expecting immediate advice. The question is initially what would make reality intelligible, rather than how a theory might improve productivity. Practical applications should follow from the distinctions, rather than determine in advance which conclusions are acceptable.

Aristotle introduces four senses of cause in I.3.

• A material cause answers what something is made from.
• A formal cause answers what it is, or gives its defining account.
• A moving cause, often called an efficient cause, identifies the source from which change begins.
• A final cause identifies that for the sake of which something occurs.

Aristotle's four senses of cause include more than a source producing a change.

Consider a deliberately simplified contemporary example: a workshop makes a wooden chair for a classroom. The timber, the arrangement that makes it a chair, the workshop's making of it, and the purpose of seating students answer different questions. None of these answers automatically eliminates the others. This is an illustration of Aristotle's distinctions, not his example or a claim that every artifact is a natural substance. Its point is that asking what caused something requires clarity about which explanatory question is being asked.