Anaxagoras’s metaphysical foundations

2021 ◽  
pp. 12-34
Author(s):  
Anna Marmodoro
Keyword(s):  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
The World

This chapter introduces Anaxagoras’s metaphysics and the relations of fundamentality and composition that hold between entities in his ontology: the Opposites (properties), stuffs, objects, the so-called seeds (i.e., reified structures), and nous with its vortex. The chapter argues that the crux of Anaxagoras’s metaphysics, which will also influence Plato the most, is the stance that parts of properties are parts of objects. Objects are qualified by properties by having parts of properties (in preponderance) within their constitution. Thus, constitutional overlap is the ‘mechanism’ by which Anaxagoras accounts for the qualification of objects. The chapter provides an account of Anaxagoras’s Opposites as causal powers and explains the type of causal efficacy the Opposites have in the world: constitutional causal efficacy.

Plato’s Forms as powers

2021 ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Anna Marmodoro
Keyword(s):  
Physical World ◽  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
Difference Makers

This chapter introduces Plato’s fundamental entities, the Forms. It focuses on his view that the Forms are causal powers, and his innovative stance that the Forms are transcendent entities; it argues that Plato’s Forms are transcendent powers. This raises the (difficult) question of what kind of causal efficacy transcendent entities can have on things in the physical world. By showing that Plato’s Forms are causal powers having constitutional causal efficacy, as difference-makers, like Anaxagoras’s Opposites, the chapter begins to build the case for what I call Plato’s Anaxagoreanism. If the Forms operate like Anaxagoras’s Opposites, by constitutional causal efficacy, except that they are transcendent, how can features of objects in the physical world be constitutionally derived from features of transcendent entities, the Forms? The chapter argues that Plato thinks of the causal efficacy of the Forms on the model of the normativity of mathematics and geometry over the sensible world.

Boyle, Robert (1627–91)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rose-Mary Sargent
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Experimental Methods ◽  
Experimental Investigations ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
Advance Knowledge

Boyle is often remembered for the contributions that he made to the sciences of chemistry and pneumatics. Like other natural philosophers in seventeenth-century England, however, he was a synthetic thinker who sought to advance knowledge in all areas of human concern. An early advocate of experimental methods, he argued that experimentation would not only reveal the hidden processes operative in the world but would also advance the cause of religion. Through the study of nature, experimentalists would come to understand that the intricacy of design manifest in the world must be the result of an omniscient and omnipotent creator. Boyle’s experimental investigations and theological beliefs led him to a conception of the world as a ’cosmic mechanism’ comprised of a harmonious set of interrelated processes. He agreed with the leading mechanical philosophers of his day that the corpuscular hypothesis, which explains the causal powers of bodies by reference to the motions of the least parts (corpuscles) of matter, provided the best means for understanding nature. He insisted, however, that these motions and powers could not be known by reasoning alone, but would have to be discovered experimentally.

scholarly journals Look again: Pedagogical demonstration facilitates children's use of counterevidence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas P Butler
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Causal Beliefs ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Correct Rule ◽  
Conflicting Evidence ◽  
The World ◽  
Initial Hypothesis ◽  
Minimal Evidence

In learning about the world, we must not only make inferences based on minimal evidence, but must deal with conflicting evidence and question those initial inferences when they appear to be wrong. In three experiments (N=96), we found that in some cases young children only revise their causal beliefs when conflicting evidence is explicitly demonstrated for them. Four- and 5-year-old children inferred a rule about what objects had causal powers, and then saw evidence conflicting with that initial inference. Critically, the conflicting evidence was produced either instrumentally and intentionally, or demonstrated communicatively and pedagogically. Only when evidence was explicitly demonstrated for them did children revise their initial hypothesis and use a subtle clue to infer the correct rule.

scholarly journals Divine-Human Intersubjectivity and the Problem of Evil

Open Theology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-70
Author(s):  
Joseph A. Bracken
Keyword(s):  
Causal Relationship ◽  
Moral Evil ◽  
Natural Evil ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Oriented Approach

Abstract The use of the interrelated terms divine primary causality and creaturely secondary causality to describe the God-world relationship presents problems to Christian philosophers and theologians in dealing with two key issues: first, the freedom of human beings (and to some extent other finite entities) to exercise their own causal powers in independence of Divine Providence for the world of creation; secondly, the responsibility of God and all creatures for the existence of natural evil and the corresponding responsibility of God and human beings for the existence of moral evil in this world. After reviewing some of the ways these issues have been dealt with in the past, the author offers his own solution in terms of a Neo-Whiteheadian systems-oriented approach to the God-world relationship with emphasis on a reciprocal causal relationship between God and creatures so as conjointly to bring about everything that happens in this world.

Content: wide and narrow

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kent Bach
Keyword(s):  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Mental States ◽  
External Factors ◽  
Central Problem ◽  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
States Of Affairs ◽  
Turn On ◽  
External Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrow Content

A central problem in philosophy is to explain, in a way consistent with their causal efficacy, how mental states can represent states of affairs in the world. Consider, for example, that wanting water and thinking there is some in the tap can lead one to turn on the tap. The contents of these mental states pertain to things in the world (water and the tap), and yet it would seem that their causal efficacy should depend solely on their internal characteristics, not on their external relations. That is, a person could be in just those states and those states could play just the same psychological roles, even if there were no water or tap for them to refer to. However, certain arguments, based on some imaginative thought experiments, have persuaded many philosophers that thought contents do depend on external factors, both physical and social. A tempting solution to this dilemma has been to suppose that there are two kinds of content, wide and narrow. Wide content comprises the referential relations that mental states bear to things and their properties. Narrow content comprises the determinants of psychological role. Philosophers have debated whether both notions of content are viable and, if so, how they are connected.

Hume on Causation and Causal Powers

2021 ◽  
pp. 206-240
Author(s):  
Peter Millican
Keyword(s):  
Causal Powers ◽  
Predictive Success ◽  
Key Points ◽  
The World ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Causal Structures

Peter Millican addresses the issue of how to best interpret Hume’s iconic passages on causation and causal powers and aims to cut through the various interpretations by fixing twelve ‘key points’ and arguing that a reductivist reading makes best sense of them. With these twelve points regarding Hume’s theory fixed, Millican turns toward adjudicating between reductivist, subjectivist, and projectivist interpretations. First, Millican attacks subjectivist interpretations on the grounds that they emphasize melodramatic passages in tension with Hume’s more considered claims, especially the first definition of necessity. Millican backs up the critical comments about subjectivism with a plausibly Humean account of what his ‘impression of power or necessary connexion’ might be. Then he turns to projectivist interpretations. Here, he argues that projectivist readings can be accommodated by the reductivist reading he is defending. After that, he turns to the ‘New Hume’, who allegedly accepted ‘thick’ causal powers, which push beyond the two definitions of cause. However, Millican emphasizes that Hume did accept causal powers in some thinner sense, powers that reduce to causal structures in the world that allow the discovery of laws and enable predictive success.

of supposing that there are intrinsic qualitative features of mental representations—I doubt that this is a mistake—but the mistake of supposing that these intrinsic qualitative features represent the world by mirroring or picturing it so that representation goes first and foremost by way of intrinsic similarity. What could be intrinsically similar to an array of sense qualities across a sense field? Answer: an array of qualities across space and time. If this is what is primarily represented by a perceptual representation then the problem is how it is we arrive at representational contents to the effect that there are persisting objects. The natural answer is that we derive such contents; it is as if we infer them demonstratively or non-demonstratively from what is primarily represented. So persisting objects are either constructions out of distributions of qualities or the inferred causes of such distributions. It is this whole empiricist problematic which must be rejected. Representation is our characteristic activity. What justifies a particular kind of representation or judgement made immediately as a result of perceptual experience is not that it mirrors or pictures or is intrinsically similar to an independently characterizable reality but that it is the representation or judgement which we would standardly and non-collusively make under just those conditions of perceptual experience. So it is with perceptual judgements of persistence. We spontaneously and non-collusively make them on the basis of perceptual experience. Although particular judgements of persistence may be overturned by the discovery of the sort of trickery mentioned above, the overturning takes place by means of accounting for the illusory appearance of persistence as due to the causal powers of a more inclusive framework of persisting objects. The global commitment to the effect that the world is made up of persisting objects is not a reasoned consequence of some prior commitment to the effect that the world contains at least distributions of qualities over space­ time. It is something we spontaneously and dogmatically employ as a fundamental theme in our everyday representation of the way the world is. How do we earn the right to this dogmatism? How do we earn the right to spontaneously go in for representations as of persisting objects? (By what right do we so synthesize the

2013 ◽  
pp. 216-217
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Perceptual Representation ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The World ◽  
The Right ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

Power and Influence

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Corry
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
World View ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Normative Ethics ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Ontological Category ◽  
Causal Influence ◽  
The World ◽  
Species Population ◽  
Power And Influence

This book investigates the metaphysical presuppositions of a common—and very successful—reductive approach to dealing with the complexity of the world. The reductive approach in question is one in which we study the components of a complex system in relative isolation, and use the information so gained to explain or predict the behaviour of the complex whole. So, for example, ecologists explain shifts in species population in terms of interactions between individuals, geneticists explain traits of an organism in terms of interactions between genes, and physicists explain the properties of a gas in terms of collisions between the particles that make up the gas. It is argued that this reductive method makes substantive metaphysical assumptions about the world. In particular, the method assumes the existence of causal powers that manifest ‘causal influence’—a relatively unrecognized ontological category of which forces are a paradigm example. The success of the reductive method, therefore, is an argument for the existence of such causal influence. The book goes on to show that adding causal influence to our ontology gives us the resources to solve some traditional problems in the metaphysics of powers, causation, emergence, laws of nature, and possibly even normative ethics. What results, then, is not just an understanding of the reductive method, but an integrated metaphysical world view that is grounded in a novel ontology of power and influence.

Religious Experience, Human Finitude, and the Cultural-Linguistic Model

Horizons ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-259
Author(s):  
Tiina Allik
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Causal Efficacy ◽  
Modern View ◽  
Linguistic Model ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Finitude

AbstractThe article argues that the anthropology of the cultural-linguistic model elaborates the radical materiality, historicity, and contingency of religious experience in a way that the experiential-expressivist model does not. More specifically, the article argues that experiential-expressivist thinkers who conceptualize religious experience as having a nonconceptual core which is not constituted by the contingencies of a person's material, social, and historical environments implicitly compromise human finitude. The article also suggests that the cultural-linguistic model will seem threatening to our sense of human freedom as long as we share the modern assumption that material causes and human choices are competing kinds of “things” in the world, rather than being descriptions of the same concrete phenomena from different perspectives and for different purposes, and that the cultural-linguistic model will seem atheistic if one shares the modern view that this-worldly causal efficacy is in competition with God's agency.

Responsibility and the Metaphysics of Omissions

Non-Being ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 294-309
Author(s):  
Carolina Sartorio
Keyword(s):  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
The World

What is the bearing of the metaphysics of omissions on debates about moral responsibility? If it turned out that omissions and absences in general don’t have any causal powers, what would follow about the moral responsibility of agents in certain cases where omissions and absences seem to be involved? This paper examines these and related questions. It will look at the significance of the distinction between views on which omissions and absences can have causal powers. It will examine cases where the moral responsibility of agents seems to involve absences as either causes, effects, or causal intermediaries. It will also examine the bearing of the metaphysics of omissions on views according to which the moral responsibility of agents for their choices depends on the agent’s sensitivity to negative features of the world around them.

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