(Translated from Aristote et l'entreprise)
When the name of Aristotle is uttered, many ears close. How boring! How pretentious! And yet, if we speak like students in a high school, he was not so stupid, this Aristotle…
Consider the four types of causes he has counted: final, formal, material, moving (or efficient) cause. For a long time I did not understand them, but as I kept some memories of the course in philosophy I could see that computerization was the material cause of the financial crisis (see Comprendre la crise) because it has made this crisis possible - and if you cogitate a little, you understand that once the crisis was possible, it was in fact inevitable.
Wondering what place could play in our businesses the three other types of causes, I discovered to my surprise that they stack in a familiar pattern.
If Aristotle were alive today, he certainly would be interested in the business, because it is the locus of the action of mankind in the biosphere - but French philosophers, in their majority, prefer to denigrate business rather than observing it.
