HEN, POLLA, ARCHAI AND AITIAI

Abstract

In this article, the author analyzes challenges for the Aristotles’ doctrine of the causes triggered by the attempts to fit Eleatic philosophers into its framework. Negation of motion and change, absolutization of the one without allowing the plurality, should have prevented any mentioning of the causes in the doctrines of Xenophanes, Parmenides, Zeno and Melissus. Nevertheless, there were some attempts in that direction as early as in interpreting of Xenophanes’ opinions, only to gain in intensity with the Parmenides’ poem On Nature. The commentators clearly saw in Aristotles’ views of Parmenides’ one traces of the formal cause, in contrast to the Melissus’ one which would correspond to the material cause. However, according to the author, this insight is less important than the Stagirites’ assumption of the authenticity of the second part of Parmenides’ poem. Not only that the “Way of Seeming” may be understood as the “best explanation” of phenomena, but only when some kind of “organization of the world” is mentioned we can look for the causes. By recognizing in the “Way of Seeming” implications of his material and efficient causes, Aristotle made the metaphysical chain linking Presocratics unbroken, i.e. made his causal schematism through cosmology of the most popular Eleatics link as “naturally” as possible the “systems” of Pre-Parmenides thinkers with the “systems” of Post-Parmenides philosophers.