David Ebrey Making Room for Matter: Material Causes in the Phaedo and the Physics Abstract: It is often claimed that Socrates rejects material causes in the Phaedo because they are not rational or not teleological. In this paper I argue for a new account: Socrates ultimately rejects material causes because he is committed to each change having a single cause. Because each change has a single cause, this cause must, on its own, provide an adequate explanation for the change. Material causes cannot provide an adequate explanation on their own and so Socrates rejects them. Aristotle agrees that material causes cannot explain changes on their own, but by allowing the same change to have multiple causes, he makes room for a material cause. Aristotle draws attention to the anti-Platonic implications of his four causes in a passage in Physics II.3 (195a3- 14) that has been overlooked by commentators. Keywords: Matter, Cause, Explanation, Plato’s Phaedo, Aristotle’s Physics  David Ebrey: Northwestern University – Philosophy, Kresge 2-335 1880 Campus Dr., Evanston, Illinois 60208, United States; E-Mail: d-ebrey@northwestern.edu Introduction Socrates rejects material causes in the Phaedo, in sharp contrast to Aristotle, who gives them a fundamental role in his account of the natural world. It is frequently suggested that Socrates rejects material causation because he re- quires causes to be rational or to be teleological. 1 Aristotle would then be able to have material causes because he does not have any such requirement. In this paper I argue that this is not the source of their disagreement. Instead, Plato and Aristotle ultimately disagree about material causation because of a differ- ence in their causal frameworks: Socrates thinks that each change has just one cause, whereas Aristotle thinks each change has multiple causes. If each change has only one cause, this cause must adequately explain the change on  1 E.g., Annas 1982, Bostock 1986, Wiggins 1986, Hankinson 1998, Menn 2010, whose views are discussed below. DOI 10.1515/apeiron-2013-0012  apeiron 2014; 47(2): 245 – 265 Authenticated | d-ebrey@northwestern.edu author's copy Download Date | 4/15/14 3:04 PM