/lit/ - Literature

>>20347879
>I have never been able to get a straight answer on how to determine a final cause out of an Aristotelian besides what they feel the final cause is.
That's because there are precisely zero (0) Aristotelians, just Thomists who cling to Aristotle as an idol so that you are forced to humor the idea that they have a serious philosophy.

In Aristotle's thought the Earth is surrounded by 47-55 Planets, which are the Gods. These Gods "cause" causality by in truth being the end point of a chain that actually moves up from stuff below them, but it's a lot easier if we just view them as sending causality down. In short, they beam down teleology. Because there's multiple of them though, things can have "mixed" teleologies. For example, you can pound a nail into a piece of wood with a saw. Why? Because the "cutting" teleology is stronger than the "pounding" teleology, yes, but it is still there.
>But wait, that means that there might be multiple ends to something!
True.
>but that means that there can be multiple ends to something!
True.
>so how do we determine what the multiple ends (47-55, but we could also argue that they interact and refract or something so maybe more, maybe less) are?
Philosophy. The point of philosophy in Aristotle, in brief, is figuring out what the final causes are. Aristotle's empiricism plays a role in this in that it allows us to actually figure out what the final causes of some given thing are by examining it, which prevents the problem that Plato runs into when divorcing the mind from the material world where two people can have radically different ideas of what a Form is: the Gods have given us a referee, the world around us.

Al-Kindi proposed a materialistic version of this by arguing that the Planets weren't actually intelligent, they were just a part of the universe that Allah put in place.