Page 10 - GALIET PHYSICS BLOSSOMS I+

4. The Final cause is the object’s “telos” or its final aim or purpose. To Aristotle, nothing in nature exists without a purpose.
(ii) Now illustrate what you have said by explaining in detail what you think are the four causes for (a) a stone on the seashore, and (b) a clock.
(a) For a Single Stone on the Seashore
1. The Material cause can be igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary.
2. The Formal cause can be round, oval, pear-shaped, heart-shaped,
square, rectangular, etc.
3. The scientific Efficient cause is the iron catastrophe and subsequent
layering of the earth, erosion, etc.
4. The stone in itself has no final purpose per se. But there are many
ends for a stone depending on man’s needs. It can be polished into an arrowhead and used for hunting as the primitives did, it can be used for counting, for hammering sticks into the ground, for creating fire by friction, for adorning things, and creating stone mosaics, as the one shown:
Seashore stones can also be used to frame an underground cooking pits as done by the Araucano natives in southern Chile, as fishing weights and paperweights, for building dwellings, temples, pyramids, Macchu Picchu, Tiwanaku or Chichenitza. They can be used to form heaps: boundaries (inuksuk), soil sampling markers and burial mounds. The Jews place stones above Jewish graves in an act of remembrance. Stones were also used to mark crossroads (the Herma, where each traveller added a stone). Stones are used to hit and kill (David and Goliath), or to stone infidels. A stone’s purpose may be many things, but it can never be a tree. In this sense, it has no natural potentiality. However, once I saw a little tree? form naturally out of a seashore pebble.
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