So instead of Plato’s philosophy of transcendence, in which everything is a reflection or a sign of something higher and more real, Aristotle gives us a philosophy of causation. Everything that is, has been caused to be or made to happen; and when we discover the cause or causes of a thing, we learn what it is supposed to do and be. We “possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing,” Aristotle declares in his Posterior Analytics, “when we think that we know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other.”
