scholarly journals The Roots of Occasionalism? Causation, Metaphysical Dependence, and Soul-Body Relations in Augustine

Vivarium ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Tamer Nawar
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Causal Influence ◽  
Dependence Relations ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Metaphysical Dependence

Abstract It has long been thought that Augustine holds that corporeal objects cannot act upon incorporeal souls. However, precisely how and why Augustine imposes limitations upon the causal powers of corporeal objects remains obscure. In this paper, the author clarifies Augustine’s views about the causal and dependence relations between body and soul. He argues that, contrary to what is often thought, Augustine allows that corporeal objects do act upon souls and merely rules out that corporeal objects exercise a particular kind of causal power (that of efficient or sustaining causes). He clarifies how Augustine conceives of the kind of causal influence exercised by souls and bodies.

Causal Power

2019 ◽  
pp. 43-64
Author(s):  
Richard Corry
Keyword(s):  
Force Fields ◽  
Causal Power ◽  
Conditional Analysis ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Reductive Explanation ◽  
Causal Influence

This chapter investigates the ontology of causal power and causal influence that was suggested by the discussion of reductive explanation in the previous two chapters. In particular, it is suggested that we should understand causal powers to be dispositions to manifest causal influence. Such powers, it is shown, can be given a conditional analysis that is less susceptible to counterexamples than conditional analyses of dispositions more generally. It is further argued that the conditional analysis can be extended to cover multi-track powers by using functions, rather than conditionals, to describe powers. Functional descriptions of powers connect nicely to the descriptions of force fields that one finds in physics, suggesting that we can interpret forces as influences in the sense described here.

Reality and its Structure

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Current Literature ◽  
Dependence Relations ◽  
Metaphysical Dependence ◽  
The Subject

This volume brings together fourteen essays from leading and emerging scholars that address issues relating to the view that has come to be known as metaphysical foundationalism, and explore possibilities regarding its alternatives. According to the foundationalist, reality is hierarchically arranged with chains of entities ordered by metaphysical dependence relations that terminate in a fundamental ground populated by consistent and contingent entities. Each essay in this volume addresses some aspect or other of at least one of these core commitments. Must there be anything fundamental? Is reality hierarchically structured? Why should we be foundationalists? Is metaphysical infinitism possible? Is metaphysical coherentism possible? What does reality look like if we allow inconsistent fundamentalia? These are the sorts of pertinent questions seldom asked in the current literature, and exactly the kinds of questions addressed in this volume. The volume, then, aims to open up a much broader perspective on metaphysical dependence than currently exists, and point to ways of exploring new avenues of thought on the subject.

Causal Models

2019 ◽  
pp. 159-185
Author(s):  
Richard Corry
Keyword(s):  
Causal Models ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Causal Influence ◽  
Causal Modelling ◽  
Modelling Framework ◽  
Standard Framework ◽  
Power And Influence

This chapter shows how the ontology of power and influence can be used to interpret and extend the causal modelling framework developed by Judea Pearl, Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines. In particular, it is argued that the standard causal modelling framework suffers from an important limitation in that it is not truly modular. A modification to the standard framework is presented that overcomes this limitation. In the modified framework, the basic relations explicitly represent basic causal powers and the influences that they manifest. These ‘causal influence models’ can be used to generate standard causal models, and so can do everything that the standard causal models can do. It is argued, however, that there are both theoretical and practical reasons for preferring causal influence models over standard causal models.

scholarly journals Abstract Objects in the Causal Order

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Justin Ngai
Keyword(s):  
Abstract Objects ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Causal Order ◽  
Causal Influence ◽  
The Third ◽  
Abstract Entities ◽  
To Come

<p>Abstract entities have long been viewed as entities that lack causal powers; that is, they cannot be constitutive of causes or effects. This thesis aims to reject this claim and argue that abstract objects are indeed part of the causal order. I will call this thesis ‘AOCO’ for short. In the first chapter I argue that other philosophers have committed themselves to the claim that some abstract objects have been caused to come into existence. In the second chapter, I argue that the best solution to Benacerraf’s problem is to concede that abstract objects have a causal influence on what we believe. In the third chapter I examine and evaluate objections to AOCO.</p>

Causal Influence

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-42
Author(s):  
Richard Corry
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Causal Influence

This chapter argues that the reductive method of explanation assumes an ontology of causal powers that manifest invariant causal influence. The reductive method takes what we know about how systems behave in one situation (typically a situation of relative isolation), and apply that knowledge to explain or predict the behaviour of the system in another situation (such as when it is a part of a more complex system). If this method is to work, then there must be something that remains constant from one situation to another in a way that supports the method. It is shown that standard ontologies do not contain anything that can fulfil this role. It is then shown that a relatively novel kind of entity, dubbed ‘causal influence’, can do the job.

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.

scholarly journals Material Parts in Social Structures

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dave Elder-Vass
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Causal Influence ◽  
Human Material ◽  
Social Entities

AbstractThere has been much debate on whether and how groups of human agents can constitute social structures with causal significance. Both sides in this debate, however, implicitly privilege human individuals over non-human material objects and tend to ignore the possibility that such objects might also play a significant role in social structures. This paper argues that social entities are often composed of both human agents and non-human material objects, and that both may make essential contributions to their causal influence. In such cases the causal influence of social structures should be attributed to the emergent causal powers of what I call socio-technical entities.

scholarly journals Why Rosenberg and Kaplan's attempt to reconcile physicalism and antireductionism concerning biology is unsatisfactory

2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-18
Author(s):  
Slobodan Perovic
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Physical Systems ◽  
Molecular Systems ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Basic Law ◽  
Reductive Physicalism ◽  
Biological Laws ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
Physical Laws

A. Rosenberg and D. Kaplan argue that their account of the Principle of Natural Selection (PNS), as a law of physical systems (including those systems studied by biology) underived from familiar physical laws, provides the precisely explanatory autonomy of biology sought after by antireductionists, without violating the principles of reductive physicalism. I argue, however, that the possibility of the PNS being an underived law of physical systems may be neutral to the explanatory autonomy of biology. In fact, if wedded with reductive physicalism (the possibility considered by these authors), it may yield only a very limited explanatory autonomy of biology, no stronger than the quasi-autonomy generally ascribed to it by reductionists. In the physicalist world, the PNS is operational and thus discoverable at the higher ontological levels (those concerning living cells, individuals, groups, populations and species), because the operation of a law concerning higher-level systems is grounded in its operation at the lower levels (atoms and molecules). Consequently, in terms of the explanatory criterion, a generalization discovered by biologists may be established as a law only if its status is confirmed in the form of its applicability to molecular and other systems studied by chemistry and physics. Otherwise, there is a danger that it could be a 'just so story.' The authors' narrow understanding both of antireductionism and biological laws as reducible to those concerning molecular systems provides only an illusory vindication of the explanatory autonomy: in the case of the PNS, although biologists happened to be the first to utilize it, their research concerning cells, individuals, populations and species could not possibly have established it as a law. This results, at best, in the inter-theoretic irreducibility of molecular biology as a discipline of physical science. I argue that a substantial explanatory autonomy of biology concerns the causal powers of biological systems at multiple levels, where the PNS, or any other biological law, is a basic law of nature in that it is concerned with the entities whose causal power is irreducible to that of the lower-level entities. Thus, only if confirmable at the levels higher than the molecular, could the generalizations discovered by biologists reflect such autonomy.

Aristotelian Powers at Work

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Marmodoro
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Causal Agent ◽  
Mutual Interaction ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Fundamental Idea

This paper puts powers to work by developing a broadly Aristotelian account of causation, built on the fundamental idea (which Aristotle found in Plato, attributed by him to Heraclitus) that causation is a mutual interaction between powers. On this Aristotelian view, causal powers manifest them-selves in dependence on the manifestation of their mutual partners. (See also Heil, this volume; Mumford, this volume; and Martin 2008.) The manifestations of two causal power partners are co-determined, co-varying, and co-extensive in time. (See Marmodoro 2006.) Yet, causation has a direction and is thus asymmetric. This asymmetry is what underpins metaphysically the distinction between causal agent and patient. The proposed Aristotelian analysis of the interaction between mutually manifesting causal powers is distinctive, in that it pays justice to the intuition that there is agency in causation. That is, agency is not a metaphorical way of describing what causal powers do. For some powers, it is a way of being that instantiates the non-anthropomorphic sense in which powers are causal agents. This point is brought out in the paper in relation to the explanation of the concept of change. In an Aristotelian fashion, the paper argues that the distinction be-tween agent and patient in causation is pivotal to offering a realist account of causation that does not reify the interaction of the reciprocal causal partners into a relation. On the proposed view, the interaction between mutually manifesting causal partners consists in the power of one substance being realized in another substance. Specifically, the agent’s causal powers metaphysically belong to the agent, but come to be realized in the patient. The significance of this is that the interaction of the agent’s and the patient’s powers is not a relation; rather, it is an ex-tension of the constitution of the agent onto the patient, which occurs when agent and patient interact and their powers are mutually manifested. Thus the proposed Aristotelian account of causation explains the mutual interaction between manifestation partners—potentiality, agency, and change—as irreducible to one another, but interconnected.

Scepticism, Causal Science and ‘The Old Hume’

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Causal Power ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Subjective Impression ◽  
Pyrrhonian Scepticism

This paper replies to Peter Millican (Mind, 2009), who argues that Hume denies the possible existence of causal powers which underlie the regularities that we observe in nature. I argue that Hume's own philosophical views on causal power cannot be considered apart from his mitigated skepticism. His account of the origin of the idea of causal power, which traces it to a subjective impression, only leads to what he calls ‘Pyrrhonian scepticism’. He holds that we can only escape such excessive skepticism by way of a natural judgment based on the association of ideas, which forms the basis of what he calls ‘a legitimate ground of Assent’.

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