Efficient and Final Cause as CPT Reciprocals

Aristotle’s final cause is little respected in the hard sciences where Operationality of concepts is required. Three “common sense” reasons have dictated this rejection. First, “Is not the idea that a cause may operate from a not yet existing future obviously absurd?” Second, “Everybody can see that a stone thrown in a pond emits a diverging wave, but to visualize the reversed sequence one has to run a film taken from the reality backwards; retrocausation is nonsense.” Last but not least, “Who believes that an idea can move matter?” Common sense may be fooled by these sorts of arguments. Today a billiards player or a car driver easily accepts that if there were no friction, motion would persist indefinitely; in ancient Greece the flying javelin did not convince Aristotle or anyone else that no force is needed to sustain uniform motion. Galileo did not prove the law of inertia by high precision measurements; he made it plausible by simple observations and experiments. High precision verifications came later, first from celestial mechanics, including the most impressive one from general relativity: advance of Mercury’s perihelion.

Translated form the French text.