Simply Unsuccessful: The Neo-Platonic Proof of God’s Existence

Edward Feser defends the ‘Neo-Platonic proof’ for the existence of the God of classical theism. After articulating the argument and a number of preliminaries, I first argue that premise three of Feser’s argument – the causal principle that every composite object requires a sustaining efficient cause to combine its parts – is both unjustified and dialectically ill-situated. I then argue that the Neo-Platonic proof fails to deliver the mindedness of the absolutely simple being and instead militates against its mindedness. Finally, I uncover two tensions between Trinitarianism and the Neo-Platonic proof and one tension between the Neo-Platonic proof (and, more generally, classical theism) and the incarnation.

The Concept of Matrimonial Consent in Can. 1057 CIC 1983

The article is devoted to matrimonial consent as described in Can. 1057 CIC/83, which has replaced the former Can. 1081 CIC/17. The regulation found in this canon emphasizes the importance of matrimonial consent and constitutes the basis for all reasons for the nullification of marriage. The analyzed norm, describing matrimonial consent in the positive aspect, was formulated in the personalistic spirit and adapted to Vatican II's teachings. Can. 1057 CIC/83 was placed among the norms introducing the De matrimonio of CIC/83 part, which resulted in ordering the vision of marriage in CIC/83. The studies on the normative content of Can. 1057 §1, CIC/83, focus on matrimonial consent, which establishes the matrimonial bond and is the only efficient cause of marriage, being a bilateral consensual contract and a sacrament for those baptized. The article discusses legal requirements assuring that consent will result in contracting a valid marriage. The article explains in detail the norm, according to which a defective matrimonial consent cannot be supplemented or replaced by another legal act. The article analyses the object of matrimonial consent in Can. 1057 §2, CIC/83, which was harmonized with the definition of marriage in Can. 1055 CIC/83. Ius in corpus is no longer such an object (as it narrows marriage to a communion finding fulfillment in the sexual and procreative sphere) but rather the parties to the contract, who give themselves to one another in an analogous sense (material object) and the communion for their entire life, in all its dimensions (formal object).

Man–a Human Person in the Context of the Theory of Efficient and Purposeful Causality. Pedagogical Implications

This article aims to justify the thesis about the need to develop transcendent, transcendental and teleological pedagogy in connection with the anthropological basis, which is the theory of the person and causality. A man–a person – is an ontically substantial individual being, demanding an external cause, which is the Pure Act of Existence–Transcendens–Absolute. The personalistic pedagogics and the pedagogy of the person are therefore inherently related to transcendence. If the subject and object of education is a human person, then transcendental pedagogy must be a sine qua non condition for practising personalistic pedagogics and pedagogy of the person. Personalistic pedagogics and the pedagogy of the person are also intrinsically related to teleology. Efficient cause is coupled with purposeful cause. If there is an action of the Absolute which results in the existence of a man, a human person, then the Absolute, as the fullness of good, is the ultimate goal-motive and final cause of the man–human person. The teleological aspect in personalistic pedagogy and the pedagogy of the person means a particular aim and meaning orientation; full realisation of potentialities and tasks dormant in a unique being–a human person. The goal is not to achieve perfection, but to direct to your original source – the Transcendent–the Absolute–God.

A biochemically-realisable model of the self-manufacturing cell

As shown by Hofmeyr, the processes in the living cell can be divided into three classes of efficient causes that produce each other, so making the cell closed to efficient causation, the hallmark of an organism. They are the enzyme catalysts of covalent metabolic chemistry, the intracellular milieu that drives the supramolecular processes of chaperone-assisted folding and self-assembly of polypeptides and nucleic acids into functional catalysts and transporters, and the membrane transporters that maintain the intracellular milieu, in particular its electrolyte composition. Each class of efficient cause can be modelled as a relational diagram in the form of a mapping in graph-theoretic form, and a minimal model of a self-manufacturing system that is closed to efficient causation can be constructed from these three mappings using the formalism of relational biology. This Fabrication-Assembly or (F,A)-system serves as an alternative to Robert Rosen's replicative Metabolism-Repair or (M,R)-system, which has been notoriously problematic to realise in terms of real biochemical processes. A key feature of the model is the explicit incorporation of formal cause, which arrests the infinite regress that plagues all relational models of the cell. The (F,A)-system is extended into a detailed formal model of the self-manufacturing cell that has a clear biochemical realisation. This (F,A) cell model allows the interpretation and visualisation of concepts such as the metabolism and repair components of Rosen's (M,R)-system, John von Neumann's universal constructor, Howard Pattee's symbol-function split via the symbol-folding transformation, Marcello Barbieri's genotype-ribotype-phenotype ontology, and Tibor Gánti's chemoton. The (F,A) cell model also teaches us that, from the cell up to ecosystems, human organisations and societies, the internal context that allows members to function efficiently has agency, and should therefore be actively maintained from within by those very members.

Sobre o Caráter Absoluto ou Relativo da Noção de Bem em sua Conexão com as Noções de Forma e Matéria

In ethics, the good is the final cause of every action. All other causes are what they are relatively to the final cause, but the final cause is not relative to something else, except as means and efficient cause of an ulterior motive, whereby the supreme end, whose possession brings happiness, is the absolute in ethics. In physics, the same thing: the living being tends to the fullness of its eidos (form) and all matter is moved towards that end. But the notion of happiness is a kind of empty truism (everyone wants to be happy) and the correspondent good will also remain empty until determined by relation to some substantive content, and in that determination we will fatally see the polyphony and the antilogy break out. In the realm of nature, as long as the good is thought from a philosophy of form and as what is useful and advantageous, that strengthens, brings health and preserves life, we will then have a total relativization of its absolute sense, because one form needs to snatch the matter from the other to survive, and the good of one, therefore, will be the evil of another. How to determine the good from the point of view of a philosophy of matter?

The problem of mind-body interaction and the causal principle of Descartes’s Third Meditation

The article analyses recent English publications in Cartesian studies that deal with two problems: (1) the problem of the intrinsic coherence of Descartes’s doctrine of the real distinction and interaction between mind and body and (2) the problem of the consistency of this doctrine with the causal principle formulated in the Third Meditation. The principle at issue is alternatively interpreted by different Cartesian scholars either as the Hierarchy Principle, that the cause should be at least as perfect as its effects, or the Containment Principle, that the cause should contain all there is in its effects. The author argues that Descartes’s claim (in his argument against the scholastic doctrine of substantial forms) that it is inconceivable how things of different natures can interact does not conflict with the acknowledgement of interaction between things of different natures in the case of soul and body. The case is made that Cartesian mind-body interaction can agree with both the Hierarchy Principle and the Containment Principle, because the Principle is about total and efficient cause, whereas in the interaction, mental and brain states are only partial (and plausibly, in the case of brains states, occasional) causes. In particular, in the case of the causality in the brain-to-mind direction, the mind is conditioned by brain states to form the corresponding specific ideas on the basis of its innate general ideas of movements, forms, colours, etc. Eventually, for Descartes, the most natural way to deal with worries about the possibility of mind-brain interaction is to rely on God’s omnipotence, which certainly enables Him to arrange for such interaction.

Desire and Action

Aristotle held, it is argued, that desire, like anger, is to be defined as inextricably psycho-physical process (or activity), a specific type of bodily change. It is the realization of a goal-directed essentially material capacity. This is the type of capacity required if desire is to be the efficient cause of bodily movements, their origin and controller. Its form, if constituted by this capacity, needs to be, in its own nature, an enmattered form to be their cause. This account of desire is an instance of the Impure Form Interpretation developed in Chapters 1 and 2. It is argued that this interpretation best capatures Aristotle’s own positive theory and his critical remarks on alternatives, such as the ‘harmony theory’. Attempts to understand his account of desire in terms of two definitionally distinct components, one purely psychological, one purely physical, are rejected as inadequate because they cannot properly accommodate the efficient causal role he attributed to its form.

Unseating the Craftsman: Natural Efficient Cause in Aristotle's Craft Analogy

In this essay, I respond to a problem raised by Sarah Broadie in her 1987 article “Nature, Craft and Phronesis in Aristotle.” Broadie analyzes Aristotle’s famous craft analogy for natural causation in order to determine whether or not it requires importing a psychological dimension to natural teleology. She argues that it is possible to make sense of the analogy without psychology, but that the tradeoff is a conception of craft so thoroughly de-psychologized that it is rendered unrecognizable, perhaps even incoherent as a referent. I dispute this suggestion and argue, rather, that Aristotle’s insistence on removing psychology from the craft side of the analogy points to his prioritization of techne itself, rather than any particular craftsman, as primary efficient agent. The lack of psychology that characterizes a techne ensures stability and reliability in the causal process that could not be guaranteed by the idiosyncratic psychologies of various craftspeople. The same kind of stability and reliability belong to nature as an efficient cause, forming the basis of the comparison between craft and natural teleology. It is therefore the craft, not the craftsman, that must stand as analog to nature. I demonstrate the value of this revision by applying the analogy to case of natural teleology: reproduction as depicted in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals. The result is a reading of Aristotle’s analogies that can assuage Broadie’s concerns and allow for a natural thing’s own nature to more fully inhabit its intended role as an inner source of change.

The Ontological Status of Causal Powers

Benjamin Hill seeks to initiate deeper contemporary discussion of the ontological challenges that drove early modern philosophers (namely, several early Cartesians, Berkeley, and Hume) to accept the negative thesis of occasionalism, that no physical object can truly be an efficient cause. He argues that we should be looking past Hume and his empiricist’s approach to secondary causation to bring the core metaphysical, issues he believes are still lingering, into sharper focus. Hill walks us backwards from Hume’s empirical critiques of powers in the Enquiry and Treatise to Locke’s presentation of the ‘popular’ view that experience lead us to postulate powers as a response to occasionalism. This, he suggests, reveals that the early modern debate about causal powers tracked not the divide between scholastics and mechanical philosophers but the divide between realists and occasionalists and revolved around a confusion between them regarding what was the underlying question of the debate. For the occasionalists, it was not really about whether or not causal powers did exist, but about explaining how they could exist. This leads Hill to explore the metaphysical worries animating seventeenth-century occasionalists.