material cause

The tribunal said that her protected disclosures were "an effective or material cause of her treatment".

After the bill was slimmed down — leaving provisions such as one restoring the existing statute, which had been rendered ineffective by a subsequent law, and another requiring the franchiser to establish material cause before terminating the franchise — the industry group withdrew its opposition, allowing swift passage.

There are no formal or final causes, and the material cause never varies.

As far as Aristotle was concerned, as we saw in Chapter 3, causal explanations had four components: the formal cause, the final cause, the material cause and the efficient cause.

Thus if I construct a table, the formal cause is the design I have in mind; the final cause is my desire to have somewhere to eat my meals; the material cause is various pieces of wood; and the efficient causes are a saw and a hammer.