A modern-day sophisticated Bayesian will at once remark, “This requires me to draw a circular causal diagram with an arrow going from the future to the past.”
It’s not clear to me to what extent Aristotle appreciated this point—that you could not draw causal arrows from the future to the past. Aristotle did acknowledge that teeth also needed an efficient cause to develop. But Aristotle may have believed that the efficient cause could not act without the telos, or was directed by the telos, in which case we again have a reversed direction of causality, a dependency of the past on the future. I am no scholar of the classics, so it may be only myself who is ignorant of what Aristotle believed on this score.
This doesn’t require one to draw a causal arrow from the future to the past, at least no more so than does the chicken-egg problem. For Aristotle, the end for which organs develop is the mature life of the animal, its form. Animals inherit form from their male parents, so it’s a nice, straightforward past to present causal arrow. But that’s a little misleading, since for Aristotle there Is one and only one temporal arrangement of causal relationships: simultaneity. So no future to past arrows, and no past to future or present arrows either. This gets him in some serious trouble, and he recognizes the fact, when it comes to billianrd ball mechanics.
And to answer the bit at the end of the quoted section, Aristotle believed that the efficient cause of the animal is also its form, though by way of its male parent, in the way the art of statuemaking is the cause of a statue by way of a particular artisan. But Aristotle is pretty clear that the efficient and final cause of an animal, or organ, are extensionally identical. Which isn’t a great move, so far as providing explanations goes, but there you have it.
This doesn’t require one to draw a causal arrow from the future to the past, at least no more so than does the chicken-egg problem. For Aristotle, the end for which organs develop is the mature life of the animal, its form. Animals inherit form from their male parents, so it’s a nice, straightforward past to present causal arrow. But that’s a little misleading, since for Aristotle there Is one and only one temporal arrangement of causal relationships: simultaneity. So no future to past arrows, and no past to future or present arrows either. This gets him in some serious trouble, and he recognizes the fact, when it comes to billianrd ball mechanics.
And to answer the bit at the end of the quoted section, Aristotle believed that the efficient cause of the animal is also its form, though by way of its male parent, in the way the art of statuemaking is the cause of a statue by way of a particular artisan. But Aristotle is pretty clear that the efficient and final cause of an animal, or organ, are extensionally identical. Which isn’t a great move, so far as providing explanations goes, but there you have it.