The Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez was an eminent philosopher and theologian whose _Disputationes Metaphysicae_ was first published in Spain in 1597 and was widely studied throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. The _Disputationes Metaphysicae_ had a great influence on the development of early modern philosophy and on such well-known figures as Descartes and Leibniz. This is the first time that Disputations 17, 18, and 19 have been translated into English. The _Metaphysical Disputations_ provide an excellent philosophical introduction to the medieval (...) Aristotelian discussion of efficient causality. The work constitutes a synthesis of monumental proportions: problematic issues are lucidly delineated and the various arguments are laid out in depth. Disputations 17, 18, and 19 deal explicitly with such issues as the nature of causality, the types of efficient causes, the prerequisites for causal action, causal contingency, human free choice, and chance. (shrink)

A quick scan of the leading figures in western philosophy reveals that relatively few have made a name for themselves by defending intuitive, natural, and sensible positions. Aristotle is one, and perhaps Aquinas is another. Francisco Suarez, the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastic, would be a third. His invariable working procedure is to give copious consideration to the various ancient and medieval views, and then to find some sensible compromise position. But today Suarez can hardly claim to have a broad readership. Of (...) his fifty-four Metaphysical Disputations, only nine have now been published in English, while his other works remain almost entirely untranslated. This clear and accurate new translation aims to show readers what they have been missing. (shrink)

A quick scan of the leading figures in western philosophy reveals that relatively few have made a name for themselves by defending intuitive, natural, and sensible positions. Aristotle is one, and perhaps Aquinas is another. Francisco Suarez, the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastic, would be a third. His invariable working procedure is to give copious consideration to the various ancient and medieval views, and then to find some sensible compromise position. But today Suarez can hardly claim to have a broad readership. Of (...) his fifty-four Metaphysical Disputations, only nine have now been published in English, while his other works remain almost entirely untranslated. This clear and accurate new translation aims to show readers what they have been missing. (shrink)

The subject of causality appears in many of the solutions proposed by Duns Scotus on various philosophical problems, such as voluntary act, and theological problems, as the divine dispensation of grace in the sacraments. This paper shows the kinds of causes and causality which are involved in the actual act of intellection. It focuses on the concept of essential order as the source of the different kinds of causal concurrence, and applies this concept to the act of actual (...) intellection, interpreting it according to the idea of unitas ordinis. (shrink)

Ibn Sina’s theory of efficient causality includes the definitions of metaphysical and natural efficient causes. In the first section, these definitions and two theses about their relation will be introduced. َAccording to the first thesis, natural efficient causes do not bestow existence and therefore they are not metaphysical. The alternative thesis defends bestowing existence by natural efficient causes, although this ontological status is restricted only to conferring existence of motion. In the second section, I will (...) argue that, according to Ibn Sina, natural causes bestow existence and therefore they are metaphysical. To do that, textual evidence and second definition of efficient causality will be appealed. Bestowing existence by natural efficient causes threatens, prima facia, Ibn Sina's theory of divine causality as a deistic theory. However, I will finally try to show that bestowing existence by natural causes leads to a theory which respects special divine action, and so it is not deistic. (shrink)

For Suárez, the general notion of efficient causality and the reality of it are known not through an abstraction from supposed “primitive” experiences of connection between causes and effects but indirectly, through a reasoning that begins with what is directly observed and ends with the evidence that it is really in the things themselves. In this paper, I intend to show the plausibility of this interpretation in the following way: first, I will quickly present a passage in which (...) Suárez claims that efficient causality is evident; second, I will show in which sense the principle “nothing can transfer itself from nonbeing to being” has an empirical basis; and, third, I will show how the reality of efficient causation among things of the empirical world can be demonstrated from the experience of a rational order in them. (shrink)

THERE is obviously a close relation between any rational attempt to “explain” the world in terms of its activities and the prevailing views on causality. Primitive thought usually peopled the physical world with unpredictable spirits of all kinds; gods and witchdoctors were believed to influence the course of events in ways that ordinary mortals could not follow. In such a world, the intrinsic legality of events might pass almost unnoticed; it was recognizable only when the distinction between God, Man, (...) and Nature came to be clearly drawn, or only as the effects of Divine and human causality came to be disentangled from natural causal processes, which would then become describable in scientific terms. The history of thought shows that these distinctions, so obvious to us, are not easy ones to come by. (shrink)

The simplest axioms, formulated by medieval scholastics as rules of inference between potency and act, are also axioms concerning causality as they express some potency-act relations. These are: Ab esse ad posse valet illatio. A non posse ad non esse valet illatio. A posse ad esse non valet illatio. A non esse ad non posse non valet illatio. The project on formulating axioms of efficient causality by means of the prepositional variables calculus does not mean of course (...) that we try to create a complete theory of causality. We will, for the moment show that the quantification of the concepts „potency-act" by means of the concepts „set-element" or „parameter-specific numerical value" is very useful. We will also point out, intuitively, as an experiment, the logical operators which are linked very closely with such concepts as implication, potentiality, act, set, specific numeric value. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that it is in the fourteenth century that the problem of the compatibility or unity of efficient and final causality emerges. William Ockham and John Buridan start to flirt with a mechanized view of nature solely explainable by efficient causality, and they hence push final causality into the human mind and use it to explain for example action, morality and the good. Their argumentation introduces the problem of how to give (...) a unified account of the world, that is, how are nature and freedom compatible. In the paper, I set up the discussion by going through some of the problems associated with final causality in the seventeenth century and show that Ockham and Buridan's problems are similar. I then argue using a formulation from Leibniz's Monadology that the problems here traced should be seen as versions of the mind/body problem. (shrink)

This article is a contribution to the field of study that Jacques Maritain once described as “metaphysical Axiomatics.” I discuss Aquinas’s use of the metaphysical principle “omne agens agit sibi simile,” focusing on perhaps the most manifest instance of this principle, namely, univocal generation. It is well known that Aquinas holds what could be called a “static” or “formal” view of likeness between God and creatures: creatures are like God because they share in certain exemplar perfections that preexist in God. (...) My focus instead is on an efficient likeness to God, which reflects a foundational truth about reality for Aquinas: all creatures produce something like themselves through their operations, in imitation of God, who does so on a more fundamental level. My discussion will also clarify Aquinas’s derivation of the principle of similitude from a prior metaphysical principle, “every agent acts insofar as it is in act.”. (shrink)

This Dorda's opus vitae was ready for publication in 1970 but it contains many cogent arguments and observations. Although in many instances new advancements have been made in physics and mathematics, Dorda's basic statements and observations on causality are still relevant and interesting today. Dorda's treatise comprises an Introduction and four parts.

Willusionists claim that recent developments in psychology and neuroscience demonstrate that consciousness is causally inefficient [Carruthers, 2007; Eagleman, 2012; Wegner, 2002]. In section 1, I show that willusionists provide two types of evidence: first, evidence that we do not always know the causes of our actions; second, evidence that we lack introspective awareness of the causal efficiency of our intentional acts.In section 2, I analyze the first type of evidence. Recent research in the field of social psychology has shown that (...) irrelevant factors affect human behavior. For example, it has been shown that pleasant smells make a person more helpful toward strangers [Baron, 1997], whereas images of eyes that a person sees on a poster reduce the likelihood of cheating [Bateson, Nettle, & Roberts, 2006]. I argue that minor influences do not necessarily lead to something more sinister, and the contrary has not been empirically proven so far.In section 3, I analyze the second type of evidence that Daniel Wegner [2002] provides in favor of willusionism. Wegner claims that conscious will is usually understood in one of two ways: «as something that is experienced when we perform an action» [Wegner, 2002, p. 3] or «as a force of mind, a name for the causal link between our minds and our actions» [ibid.]. According to Wegner, it is a conceptual truth that for something to count as an instance of conscious will it must both be felt as voluntary, and causally efficient in bringing about a certain effect. Wegner claims that what satisfies can fail to satisfy, and vice versa. The major part of Wegner’s book is the review and analysis of diverse psychological phenomena: automatisms, hypnosis, illusions of control, influence of unconscious factors on human behavior, as well as some neuroscientific data. I briefly review the data provided by Wegner, and come to the conclusion that, although they show that there is a double dissociation between consciously willed processes and the acts that are supposedly caused by these processes, they do not justify further conclusions made by Wegner.According to Wegner, the feeling of conscious will is just an indicator of unconscious processes which, in fact, cause our behavior. I argue that the data considered by Wegner do not provide direct information about the neuronal processes that underlie conscious intentional processes. Moreover, double dissociation can only show that one process neither a necessary nor sufficient cause of another process. It cannot show that one process is not among the causes leading to another process.In section 4, I argue that the experimental data discussed in the article are important for philosophical theories of intentionality. (shrink)

Does mere passage of time have causal powers ? Are properties like "being n days past" causally efficient ? A pervasive intuition among metaphysicians seems to be that they don't. Events and/or objects change, and they cause or are caused by other events and/or objects; but one does not see how just the mere passage of time could cause any difference in the world. In this paper, I shall discuss a case where it seems that mere passage of time (...) does have causal powers : Sydney Shoemaker's (1969) possible world where temporal vacua (allegedly) take place. I shall argue that Shoemaker's thought-experiment doesn't really aim at teaching us that there can be time without change, but rather that if such a scenario is plausible at all (as I think it is) it provides us with good reasons to think that mere passage of time can be directly causally efficient. (shrink)

In this innovative book, Gloria Frost reconstructs and analyses Aquinas's theories on efficient causation and causal powers, focusing specifically on natural causal powers and efficient causation in nature. Frost presents each element of Aquinas's theories one by one, comparing them with other theories, as well as examining the philosophical and interpretive ambiguities in Aquinas's thought and proposing fresh solutions to conceptual difficulties. Her discussion includes explanations of Aquinas's technical scholastic terminology in jargon-free prose, as well as background on (...) medieval scientific views - including ordinary language explanations of the medieval physical theories which Aquinas assumed in formulating his views on causation and causal powers. The resulting volume is a rich exploration of a central philosophical topic in medieval philosophy and beyond, and will be valuable especially for scholars and advanced students working on Aquinas and on medieval natural philosophy. (shrink)

Cross-linguistic studies focus on inverse correlations (trade-offs) between linguistic variables that reflect different cues to linguistic meanings. For example, if a language has no case marking, it is likely to rely on word order as a cue for identification of grammatical roles. Such inverse correlations are interpreted as manifestations of language users’ tendency to use language efficiently. The present study argues that this interpretation is problematic. Linguistic variables, such as the presence of case, or flexibility of word order, are aggregate (...) properties, which do not represent the use of linguistic cues in context directly. Still, such variables can be useful for circumscribing the potential role of communicative efficiency in language evolution, if we move from cross-linguistic trade-offs to multivariate causal networks. This idea is illustrated by a case study of linguistic variables related to four types of Subject and Object cues: case marking, rigid word order of Subject and Object, tight semantics and verb-medial order. The variables are obtained from online language corpora in thirty languages, annotated with the Universal Dependencies. The causal model suggests that the relationships between the variables can be explained predominantly by sociolinguistic factors, leaving little space for a potential impact of efficient linguistic behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal Powers by Gloria FrostBrian DaviesGloria Frost. Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal Powers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. 288. Hardback, $99.99; paperback, $32.99.Philosophers have often assumed that good philosophy discusses what X, Y, or Z is essentially. And Thomas Aquinas is someone who favors this way of proceeding. At one point in his writings, he modestly recognizes that he (...) is at a loss to explain what a house fly actually is. But he continually aims to tell us what such and such really is. And he does so when it comes to “cause” (causa). One might ask, “What is a cause?” or “What is causation?” Aquinas tries to answer these questions in theoretical ways that effectively add up to definitions of ‘cause’ and ‘causation.’Unfortunately, however, Aquinas never wrote a self-contained treatise on ‘cause’ and ‘causation.’ So, in order to fully understand what he says about these terms, one must pay attention to many texts scattered throughout his many writings, which may sound like bad news. The good news, however, is that Gloria Frost has now provided (for the first time, as far as I know) what amounts to an excellent and much-needed one-volume exposition of what Aquinas says about causation. More specifically, she has given us a fine scholarly work on the history of philosophy that focuses exegetically on what Aquinas calls “efficient” causation.Following Aristotle, Aquinas distinguishes between efficient, final, formal, and material causes (all of which are explanations of some kind). Frost has accurate things to say about Aquinas on material, formal, and final causes. But it is Aquinas on efficient causation that she homes in on in great detail—understandably, since Aquinas references this notion many times over and since what he means by ‘efficient causation’ seems in various ways to correspond to what “causation” is taken to be these days by both philosophers and nonphilosophers (few of whom are familiar with the phrases ‘material causation,’ ‘formal causation,’ and ‘final causation’). Frost rightly notes that Aquinas takes final causation to be bound up with efficient causation, and she explains the relation between them (chapter 4). Still, her focus is on Aquinas on efficient causation. As she writes, “I have combed through Aquinas’s corpus to find the most important passages about efficient causation and causal powers and using them as a basis, I reconstruct his views in a systematic way” (5).Chapter 1 begins this reconstruction by providing a general overview of Aquinas on efficient causation together with some historical background and context for understanding what he says on the topic. The chapter includes reference to views on causation differing from that of Aquinas and introductions to some of Aquinas’s sources concerning efficient causation. Chapters 2 through 6 expand on this overview in great detail with many quotations from Aquinas and a lot of cross-referencing within his writings. In these chapters, Frost expounds Aquinas on topics such as the distinction between per se and per accidens causation, temporality and causation, agent and patient, causation at a distance, actuality and potentiality, active power and passive power, and causation and necessitation. Chapter 7 deals with what Frost calls “non-paradigm” cases of efficient causation (191), which include absences (which Aquinas thinks can be efficient causes) and sine qua non efficient causation (which Aquinas does not think to be genuine efficient causation). Chapter 8 is devoted to instrumental causes, primary and secondary causation, and the causality of heavenly bodies. Each chapter begins with an introduction explaining what the core of the chapter is about. And each chapter ends with a summary of the findings of the chapter. This structure, which leads Frost to repeat herself a lot, might irritate some readers. I take [End Page 661] it to be didactically helpful. Nobody can complain that Frost has failed to make it clear what she takes Aquinas to be saying.Frost’s account of Aquinas on causation is exemplary. It is written with great clarity and avoids jargon. It draws heavily on texts of Aquinas and gives us an accurate account of what he thought about efficient causation (as well as... (shrink)

Broadly speaking, ancient concepts of causality in terms of explanatory priority have been contrasted with modern discussions of causality concerned with agents or events sufficient to produce effects. As Richard Taylor claimed in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, of the four causes considered by Aristotle, all but the notion of efficient cause is now archaic. What we will consider here is a notion even less familiar than Aristotelian material, formal, and final causes—what we will call 'demonstrational (...) class='Hi'>causality'. Demonstrational causality refers to the dependence of the conclusion on the premises of a demonstration. Here, if ever, we have a case of explanational priority, since among other things what is required of the premises is that they be better known or more manifest than the conclusion. But, oddly enough, Aristotle and his medieval commentators describe demonstrational causality in the same terms as efficient causality. Aristotle speaks of the conclusion as an "effect" of the premises; his commentators speak of the "sufficiency" of first principles or axioms in producing the conclusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal Powers by Gloria FrostJulie Loveland SwanstromFROST, Gloria. Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal Powers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xii + 239 pp. Cloth, $99.99; paper, $32.99; eBook, $32.99Reconstructing Aquinas’s premodern approach to causation in which causation is an ontological rather than logical relationship is Frost’s goal in Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal Powers. Uniting components of (...) Aquinas’s discussions of causation across his corpus, Frost focuses on the cause–effect relationship, the ontological elements involved in efficient causation, and complicated cases of efficient causation. [End Page 715]Throughout, Frost provides background information from Aristotle, Avicenna, and other thinkers used by Aquinas while delving deeply into Aquinas’s views. She addresses interpretive issues while remaining focused on Aquinas’s own ideas. Frost identifies topics that prefigure historical and contemporary philosophical debates and interjects Aquinas’s thought into those conversations.In part 1, Frost elucidates Aquinas’s standard efficient causation and the corresponding causal powers. Chapter 1 reviews Aquinas’s theories of efficient causation and briefly compares them with competing theories, identifying eight elements included in per se instances of efficient causation: the agent, the action, the active power, the natural inclination giving rise to the active power, the patient, the passive power of the patient, the motion caused by the agent, and the passion undergone by the patient. Chapter 2 further examines the paradigmatic per se efficient cause, the elemental qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry adapted from Aristotle and used to explain change, and the ontological (rather than temporal) dependence of effects upon their causes. An agent acts by powers that stem from its nature. Frost addresses several medieval puzzles such as natural causes being considered generally unimpeded and no action being caused at a distance.Active and passive powers feature heavily in Aquinas’s account. In chapter 3, Frost teases out the distinction between potentiality and actuality. The relationship of matter and form in material substances relates to this distinction in various, complex ways. “Actuality” applies to form or to action that completes active potentiality. Frost addresses the communicability of forms, conceptually connecting active powers to nature and goodness. Active powers’ relations to elemental qualities, quantitative forms, and qualitative forms also appear in this chapter. Chapter 5 covers what agents operate on, passive powers in the patient. Frost addresses complexities regarding the relationship of qualities of matter to passive potentiality and adjudicates an interpretive difficulty about the relation of active potentiality and passive potentiality. She clarifies how passive potentialities do not correspond to only one active power and how different qualitative forms can give rise to the same passive potentiality. She also explains the uniqueness of creaturely passive potentiality to undergo divine action. Engaging in interpretive debate, she asserts that the passive potentiality for undergoing action and for existence differ in concept but are the same in reality.In chapter 4, Frost explains natural inclination: An agent’s actions are determined to particular ends by its form. Natural inclination explains causal regularity. Both rational and natural agents possess natural inclination. God, as creator, is the source of natural inclination. Frost notes difficulties with Aquinas’s views, including some later raised by Spinoza.Action and passion are discussed in chapter 6, wherein Frost connects action and passion to motion. Explaining how the patient’s passive potentiality is no longer passive upon actualization, she argues that this [End Page 716] change simply is motion: The mover causes, and the same motion immediately actualizes passive potentiality in the patient. Responding to challenges, Frost argues that “actuality” is an analogous term. Patients experience actuality as completing that in which thing it inheres while agents experience actuality as arising from them. Aquinas makes seemingly inconsistent statements about action and passion in terms of Aristotelian categories. Frost clarifies that if motion in the patient is passion and motion from the agent is action, then the categories explaining how motion belongs to the patient and the agent will be different.Frost turns to nonparadigmatic efficient causation in part 2. In chapter 7, she introduces additional causal scenarios. Preparing causes, advisory causes, and assisting causes highlight the interdependent... (shrink)

This paper critiques a narrative concerning causality in later scholasticism due to, among others, Des Chene, Carraud, Schmaltz, Schmid, and Pasnau. On this account, internal developments in the scholastic tradition culminating in Suárez lead to the efficient cause being regarded as the paradigmatic kind of cause, anticipating a view explicitly held by the Cartesians. Focusing on Suárez and his scholastic reception, I defend the following claims: a) Suárez’s definition of cause does not privilege efficient causation; b) Suárez’s (...) readers, from Timpler to Arriaga, did not interpret him as privileging efficient causation; c) it is only much later, in Clauberg, that we find a narrowing of the meaning of causation to efficient causal action; but d) this shift is better explained by Clauberg’s rejection of substance hylomorphism in favor of Descartes’s doctrine of substance, rather than by any troubles within the Aristotelian causal framework. (shrink)

Human freedom is often characterised as a unique power of self-determination. Accordingly, free human action is often thought to be determined by the agent in some distinctive manner. What is more, this determination is widely assumed to be a kind of efficient-causal determination. In reaction to this efficient-causal-deterministic conception of free human action, this paper argues that if one takes up the understanding of determination and causality that is offered by Anscombe in ‘Causality and Determination’, and (...) moreover takes up an understanding of free human action that is constrained by Anscombe’s account of intentional action in Intention, then an account of free human action as distinctively caused or determined by the agent is untenable. However, the notion of necessitation that Anscombe presents in ‘Causality and Determination’, which implies neither causality nor determination, offers an attractive alternative account. This alternative account pushes us to reconsider the sense in which human freedom is a power of self-determination, and to acknowledge the limits of our control in free action. (shrink)

We study the selection of adjustment sets for estimating the interventional mean under an individualized treatment rule. We assume a non-parametric causal graphical model with, possibly, hidden variables and at least one adjustment set composed of observable variables. Moreover, we assume that observable variables have positive costs associated with them. We define the cost of an observable adjustment set as the sum of the costs of the variables that comprise it. We show that in this setting there exist adjustment sets (...) that are minimum cost optimal, in the sense that they yield non-parametric estimators of the interventional mean with the smallest asymptotic variance among those that control for observable adjustment sets that have minimum cost. Our results are based on the construction of a special flow network associated with the original causal graph. We show that a minimum cost optimal adjustment set can be found by computing a maximum flow on the network, and then finding the set of vertices that are reachable from the source by augmenting paths. The optimaladj Python package implements the algorithms introduced in this article. (shrink)

The concept of efficient causation originates with Aristotle, who states that the types of cause include ‘the primary source of the change or rest’. For Medieval Aristotelians, the scope of efficient causality includes creative acts. The Islamic philosopher Avicenna is an important contributor to this conceptual change. In his Metaphysics, Avicenna defines the efficient cause or agent as that which gives being to something distinct from itself. As previous studies of Avicenna's ‘metaphysical’ conception of the (...) class='Hi'>efficient cause attest, it takes God as a model agent. This essay considers whether Avicenna's ‘metaphysical’ conception of the efficient cause applies to natural agents. It ultimately argues that Avicenna offers a unified view of the efficient cause, which includes both divine and natural agents. On this view, an efficient cause gives being to another and is simultaneous with its effect. While Avicenna's defence of this view is an important chapter in the history of the concept of the efficient cause, it is also of interest in its own right. By appeal to a version of the principle of sufficient reason, it challenges a widespread view that causes are temporally prior to their effects. (shrink)

Causal models provide a framework for precisely representing complex causal structures, where specific models can be used to efficiently predict, infer, and explain the world. At the same time, we often do not know the full causal structure a priori and so must learn it from data using a causal model search algorithm. This chapter provides a general overview of causal models and their uses, with a particular focus on causal graphical models (the most commonly used causal modeling framework) and (...) methods for learning such models from observational and experimental data. The chapter concludes with two examples of productive causal search and modeling in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Becoming is a process in which a thing moves from one state to another. In Section 1, the study will elaborate on the discussion of the Aristotelian causes taken broadly, primarily focusing on the relation between efficient and final causes. In Section 2, the study discusses the implications of Scotus’s conception of freedom, as it is reflected in the relation of the future to the past, for the efficient and final causalities. Similarly in Section 3 an examination of (...) Scotus’s conception of matter is conducted. Based on the ideas established in these sections, the study attempts to present an initial Scotistic view of becoming. -/- . (shrink)

This paper examines an important but neglected topic in Suárez’s metaphysics–—namely, his theory of efficient causation. According to Suárez, efficient causation is to be identified with action, one of Aristotle’s ten highest genera or categories. The paper shows how Suárez’s identification of efficient causation with action helps to shed light on his views about the precise nature of efficient causation, and its role in his ontology. More specifically, it shows that Suárez understands efficient causation to (...) be a distinctive or sui generis type of entity, and that he thinks we must adopt this view in order to account for the facts of efficient causation. The paper also examines several objections to Suárez’s account. (shrink)

In this paper we provide a general account of the causal models which attempt to provide a solution to the famous measurement problem of Quantum Mechanics. We will argue that—leaving aside instrumentalism which restricts the physical meaning of QM to the algorithmic prediction of measurement outcomes—the many interpretations which can be found in the literature can be distinguished through the way they model the measurement process, either in terms of the efficient cause or in terms of the final cause. (...) We will discuss and analyze why both, ‘final cause’ and ‘efficient cause’ models, face severe difficulties to solve the measurement problem. In contradistinction to these schemes we will present a new model based on the immanent cause which, we will argue, provides an intuitive understanding of the measurement process in QM. (shrink)

In this article, I present in a systematic way Aristotle’s understanding of movement (kinêsis) as efficient cause in the Generation of Animals. This aspect of movement is not disclosed in the approach to movement as an incomplete activity in contrast to energeia, which has been extensively discussed in the literature. I explain in which sense movement is the efficient cause of generation and how this movement is related to the other factors, in particular the source of movement, the (...) seminal fluid, pneuma, and the vital heat, as well as to the form and the soul. The role of movement as efficient cause of generation shows how, for Aristotle, form and soul are inseparable from matter and movement in nature. Explaining the role of movement as efficient cause of generation also helps to make sense of the multiplicity of factors involved in the efficient causality of generation. The key to articulating these factors with one another is the identity of form of the generative movement, which is specifically the same in the source, in the tools, and in the substance that is coming into being. (shrink)

Broadly drawing on the writings of Thomas Aquinas, this article is a systematic-theological (rather than historical-theological) engagement with the theme of providence and divine causality. It aims to dispel some modern misunderstandings of these topics by highlighting how pre-modern approaches differ from today's perspective. It does so by arguing, firstly, that Thomas, given his teleological focus, construes divine causality not so much as efficient causality but rather in terms of final causality. I will also make (...) the point that Thomas's calling God a ‘universal cause’ should not be construed in terms of omni-causality, as if God predetermines every event (be it necessarily or contingently). In the final part of this contribution, I make some observations on the arbitrariness of afflictions and the connection with the gratuitousness of charity within the providential ordering. (shrink)

In various texts, Aristotle assigns priority to form, in its role as a principle and cause, over matter and the matter-form compound. Given the central role played by this claim in Aristotle's search for primary substance in the Metaphysics, it is important to understand what motivates him in locating the primary causal responsibility for a thing's being what it is with the form, rather than the matter. According to Met. Theta.8, actuality [ energeia / entelecheia ] in general is prior (...) to potentiality [ dunamis ] in three ways, viz., in definition, time and substance. I propose an explicitly causal reading of this general priority claim, as it pertains to the matter-form relationship. The priority of form over matter in definition, time and substance, in my view, is best explained by appeal to the role of form as the formal, efficient and final cause of the matter-form compound, respectively, while the posteriority of matter to form according to all three notions of priority is most plausibly accounted for by the fact that the causal contribution of matter is limited to its role as material cause. When approached from this angle, the work of Met. Theta.8 can be seen to lend direct support to the more specific and explicitly causal priority claim we encounter in Met. Z.17, viz., that form is prior to matter in its role as the principle and primary cause of a matter-form compound's being what it is. (shrink)