Material causation is the first of Aristotle’s four causes: that out of which a thing is made and from which it derives its possibilities. Why is the sculpture the way it is? Because it is made of marble - and marble can hold an edge that sand cannot, weighs what bronze does not, weathers as wood will not. The material cause is not inert filler; it is the reservoir of potential (dynamis) that the other causes work upon. Matter for Aristotle is always matter-for-something, intelligible only in relation to the form it can receive - a view with echoes in alchemy’s prima materia, the undifferentiated ground awaiting transformation.
Aristotle developed the notion against his predecessors who made matter do all the explanatory work - the pre-Socratics who reduced everything to water, air, or atoms. His point was that naming the ingredients never explains the recipe: knowing a vase is clay tells you nothing about why it is a vase. Material causation is real but radically incomplete without Formal Causation (the pattern that makes it this rather than that), Efficient Causation (the agent that brought it about), and Final Causation (the end it serves).
Modern science retained material causation - promoted it, even, into one half of its entire causal vocabulary alongside the efficient cause. The physicalist ontology this produces treats reality as nothing but matter in motion, which is precisely the pre-Socratic move Aristotle diagnosed as insufficient: reductionism explains wholes by ingredients and loses the pattern in the process. The critique running through the meaning crisis discourse is not that material explanation is false but that it was never designed to be the whole story - emergence in systems theory rediscovers, in modern dress, that what things are made of underdetermines what they are.
Understanding material causation means holding both its necessity and its limits: no form without something formed, no purpose without a substrate to carry it - and yet the marble, alone, never explains the David.
See also Efficient Causation, Formal Causation, Final Causation, form, prima materia, reductionism, ontology