The Chair Roundtable Discusses Aristotle

Featuring my living room furniture:

Aristotle characterizes everything that exists into certain categories; substance, quality, quantity, relation, etc. Substance is prior to the other categories since substances exist as separate entities, while the other categories exist only as the qualities of substance. These substances include individual substances like "dog" and "chair" and also their species and genera like "animal" and "furniture." For a dog is an animal, a dog is not just some quality of an animal.

Form is different from matter. A chair's form is the structure of the chair, the chair's matter is wood. He does not accept Plato's notion of a transcendental Form of Chair; the form of the chair is the form of that particular chair. The chair's matter, wood, can also be divided into form and matter, since wood is made of earth, air, water, and fire combined in a particular way. Aristotle calls prime matter the "stuff" that has no particular form. He raises the question whether form can have no matter, to which he answers that this form without matter is God.

If matter becomes a chair the matter is chair potentially, or capable of being a chair, whereas the form is the actuality in virtue of which it is now an actual chair. Matter and form are the "causes" of what comes to be. Aristotle defines four kinds of causes; 1) material cause - what something is made of, 2) formal cause - what it is essentially, 3) efficient cause - what brought it into being, and 4) final cause - what its function is. The causes apply to things and not events.

Hickory Chair: I am a genuine hickory chair, made in 1949! My material cause is hickory!

Love Seat: I am a Love Seat! My efficient cause is love!

Rocking Chair: I am a Rocking Chair. My formal cause is rocking.

Settee: No it's not! Your final cause is rocking, not your formal cause!

Office Chair: Look at me! My efficient cause is office, but my final cause is rolling.

Settee: That's ridiculous! Neither you or the rocking chair knows what they are talking about! It figures, with you multi-pathway excuses for furniture!

Office Chair: Look who's talking! You aren't even a proper chair!

Love Seat: Can't we all just get along?