Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

December 2000.)

Perhaps ‘nothing’ initially just meant empty space and only later became the absence of space itself. It may be that there were not even any pre-existing laws that allowed for the appearance of physical space and matter. The emergence of a universe from nothing — or its emergence from an earlier form — takes us to the edge of physics.

Aristotle identified four different ‘causes’ for events and things in the world: ’material’, ‘formal’, ‘efficient’ and ‘final’. Aristotle gave the example of a statue, to help explain the terms. So, the material cause is the stuff the statue is made of. The formal cause is the blueprint or pattern or design for the statue. (Note again the different use of the word ‘formal’, as discussed in an earlier chapter. And note the ancients’ formula for a substance was matter plus form — the first two of Aristotle’s causes.) The efficient cause is the agency (the sculptor) by which the statue is produced. The final cause is the purpose for which the statue is produced. (The efficient and final causes tie in with Aristotle’s two categories of acting and being acted upon.) Some say modern science, for the most part, deals only in material causes and even tries to deny the other three. But as we’ve seen, there are searches for ‘structuralism’ — a reason for the way the universe has turned out with the laws, forces, constants and particles that it has. And there’s the search for an ultimate ‘substrate’ — something that will somehow ground the reality of what we think is out there in the world that lies deeper than the qualities and relations that we observe. And in

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