Hi. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and Deliber Hume Trust online at

W.W. History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode, Form and Function, Aristotle's

Four Causes. If you're listening to function, Aristotle's four causes.

If you're listening to this you must own or at least have access to a computer.

Maybe you're looking at it right now as you listen to this online. But if you're anything like me, there is a lot that you

don't understand about your computer. For me, computers might as well be magical devices.

I turn it on and it starts to glow, giving me powers I do not possess by nature, like

the ability to download podcasts and to watch amusing videos about cats on YouTube. But of course some people do understand computers, the ones

who design, study, build, and repair them. These people are in a good position to answer

all kinds of questions about computers.

We might describe them as computer scientists.

Some of them indeed describe themselves this way.

The more that someone understands about computers, the more claim they would have to possess the science of computers.

For all his achievements, Aristotle was of course not a computer scientist.

This was a man whose prodigious accomplishments were achieved without the benefit of Wikipedia or amusing videos about cats.

Actually, that may have been an advantage.

But if Aristotle were shown a computer, he would agree

that there must be some kind of science or knowledge for computers, what he would call

the episteme of computers. For him, this would amount to being able to give causal explanations

of computers and the things they can do. As we saw a couple of weeks ago, his theory of knowledge

assumes that having episteme means being able to give

such explanations by means of a demonstration. The goal is to understand not just that something

...