Four causes in the context of "Potential"

Aristotelianism (/ˌærɪstəˈtiːliənɪzəm/ ARR-i-stə-TEE-lee-ə-niz-əm) is a philosophical tradition inspired by the work of Aristotle, usually characterized by deductive logic and an analytic inductive method in the study of natural philosophy and metaphysics. It covers the treatment of the social sciences under a system of natural law. It answers why-questions by a scheme of four causes, including purpose or teleology, and emphasizes virtue ethics. Aristotle and his school wrote tractates on physics, biology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, and government. Any school of thought that takes one of Aristotle's distinctive positions as its starting point can be considered "Aristotelian" in the widest sense. This means that different Aristotelian theories (e.g. in ethics or in ontology) may not have much in common as far as their actual content is concerned besides their shared reference to Aristotle.

In Aristotle's time, philosophy included natural philosophy, which preceded the advent of modern science during the Scientific Revolution. The works of Aristotle were initially defended by the members of the Peripatetic school and later on by the Neoplatonists, who produced many commentaries on Aristotle's writings. In the Islamic Golden Age, Avicenna and Averroes translated the works of Aristotle into Arabic and under them, along with philosophers such as Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi, Aristotelianism became a major part of early Islamic philosophy.

The history of anatomy spans from the earliest examinations of sacrificial victims to the advanced studies of the human body conducted by modern scientists. Written descriptions of human organs and parts can be traced back thousands of years to ancient Egyptian papyri, where attention to the body was necessitated by their highly elaborate burial practices.

Theoretical considerations of the structure and function of the human body did not develop until far later, in ancient Greece. Ancient Greek philosophers, like Alcmaeon and Empedocles, and ancient Greek doctors, like Hippocrates and his school, paid attention to the causes of life, disease, and different functions of the body. Aristotle advocated dissection of animals as part of his program for understanding the causes of biological forms. During the Hellenistic Age, dissection and vivisection of human beings took place for the first time in the work of Herophilos and Erasistratus. Anatomical knowledge in antiquity would reach its apex in the person of Galen, who made important discoveries through his medical practice and his dissections of monkeys, oxen, and other animals.

In the Vedic and Hindu religions, Brahman (Sanskrit: ब्रह्मन्; IAST: Brahman) has a "variety of meanings," but in the Upanishads and later Indian philosophies it connotes 'That' from which all existence proceeds, and to which everything returns, the origin and cause of all that exists. In contemporary Hindu metaphysics it is the highest universal principle, the Ultimate reality of the universe.

Brahman is a concept found in the Vedas, and it is extensively discussed in the early Upanishads, with a variety of meanings. According to Gavin Flood, the concept of Brahman evolved and expanded from the power of sound, words, and rituals in Vedic times to the "deeper foundation of all phenomena," the "essence of the self (Atman, Self)," and the deeper "truth of a person beyond apparent difference." Other scholars such as Barbara Holdrege, Hananya Goodman, and Jan Gonda, contend that the earliest Vedic verses suggest that this ancient meaning was never the only meaning, and the concept evolved and expanded in ancient India.

Telos (/ˈtɛlɒs, ˈtiːlɒs/; Ancient Greek: τέλος, romanized: télos, lit. 'end, purpose, goal') is a term used by the philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause of a natural organ or entity, or of human art. The Greek word telos is the root of the modern term "teleology", the study of purposiveness or of objects with a view to their aims, purposes, or intentions. Teleology is central in Aristotle's work on plant and animal biology, and in his analysis of human ethics, through his theory of the four causes. Aristotle's notion that everything has a telos also gave rise to epistemology.

Dysteleology is the philosophical view that existence has no telos - no final cause from purposeful design as opposed to teleology.

Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) invented and popularized the term dysteleology (German: Dysteleologie).

In philosophy, potentiality and actuality are a pair of closely connected principles which Aristotle used to analyze motion, causality, ethics, and physiology in his Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, and On the Soul.

The concept of potentiality, in this context, generally refers to any "possibility" that a thing can be said to have. Aristotle did not consider all possibilities the same, and emphasized the importance of those that become real of their own accord when conditions are right and nothing stops them. Actuality, in contrast to potentiality, is the motion, change or activity that represents an exercise or fulfillment of a possibility, when a possibility becomes real in the fullest sense. Both these concepts therefore reflect Aristotle's belief that events in nature are not all natural in a true sense. As he saw it, many things happen accidentally, and therefore not according to the natural purposes of things.