I must admit I didn’t really look at that doodle in the corner; I thought you’d scratched it out, but apparently that’s some kind of sine wave? And yeah, that’s precisely what I meant, identifying formal with final and material with efficient causes. I first seem to have made those identifications on March 1, 2018; when did you?
I thought “before” meant what Aristotle taught and “after” meant what you made of his teaching. And I don’t care what you actually meant.
If we ignore your addition of a “first cause” and that sine wave, the “before” and “always” pictures may be ascribed to Aristotle. The “after” picture, however, may not in any case.
That’s a mere or mad assertion. “…as is privation/divergence away.”
If you say so…
You were thinking that? Then it must be true.
And “matter” is energy… So formal/final is a conflation if you arbitrarily stop there and don’t do the same for material/efficient.
No, look. In Aristotle, unlike in Christianity and the like, there is no first cause in the sense of an eternal Creator before the beginning of the temporal (the “Creation”); there is the eternal movement of everything except the unmoved mover, which latter moves the former by attracting it by its thought-thinking-itself.
The final and formal causes coincide because the final cause is the Platonic Form (eidos) or Idea (idea). And the material and efficient causes coincide because an efficient cause, a sculptor for example, is a physical being… The forms or ideas really only exist in the minds of living beings (compare Buddhism’s namarupa).
The existence of a hunger does not guarantee the existence of the object of the hunger, though…