Four Causes
Aristotle's framework for explaining why anything exists: material, formal, efficient, and final causes. A complete explanation requires all four.
Aristotle argued that to truly understand anything, you must answer four questions. The material cause: what is it made of? (A statue is made of bronze.) The formal cause: what is its form or pattern? (The statue has the shape of a human.) The efficient cause: what brought it into being? (The sculptor carved it.) The final cause: what is its purpose? (It was made to honor a hero.) Modern science largely abandoned final causes (teleology) after the Scientific Revolution, focusing on efficient and material causes. But teleological thinking persists in biology (what is the function of this organ?), in engineering (what is this system designed to do?), and in AI (what is the objective function?). Aristotle would recognize a neural network's loss function as a final cause — the telos toward which the system strains.