What do the phrases "material causes" and "material reality" mean in the context of this pamphlet?
To do so betrays a commitment to "metaphysical naturalism," the doctrine that nature is a system of material causes and effects sealed off from outside influences; and that, they say, is a matter of faith, not proof.
In his A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I (1710), he brought all objects of sense, including tangibles, within the mind; he rejected material substance, material causes, and abstract general ideas; he affirmed spiritual substance; and he answered many objections to his theory and drew the consequences, theological and epistemological.
Pepys' diary is a window onto the physical reality of life written at the exact moment when Newton was showing that everything in the universe has a material cause and effect that human beings can understand.
The company's lawyer calls you back to say you cannot resign except for "material cause" and that you have no basis for claiming such cause.
By contrast, Plato earns praise for grasping the formal cause of life; unfortunately, he then proceeds to neglect the material cause, and comes to believe that the soul can exist without its material basis.
However, from the point of view of quantity of information or exhaustiveness, the most perfect definition (perfectissima definitio), i.e., the definition enumerating all four causes of the definiendum and not just its proximate genus (material cause) and specific difference (formal cause), is superior to any other form of knowledge (fol. 6rb).
Take, for instance, the passage quoted approvingly by Lewens: "population thinking, not natural selection, is the key to conceptualizing culture in terms of material causes" (Boyd and Richerson 2000, p.421; emphasis added).
"The material causes more friction and irritation, and any friction or irritation can make little cuts or microabrasions in your skin, and those cuts can lead to bacterial infections, which can cause discomfort, itching, redness, pain," Osmun said.
Doctors in other specialties were using microscopes and chemical assays to discern the material causes of illness and to classify diseases accordingly.
Formal and material causes are internal, whereas efficient and final causes are external.
