Download or read book On Efficient Causality written by Francisco Suárez and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez (1548-1617) 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.
Download or read book Efficient Causation written by Tad M. Schmaltz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-26 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Causation is now commonly supposed to involve a succession that instantiates some law-like regularity. Efficient Causation: A History examines how our modern notion developed from a very different understanding of efficient causation. This volume begins with Aristotle's initial conception of efficient causation, and then considers the transformations and reconsiderations of this conception in late antiquity, medieval and modern philosophy, ending with contemporary accounts of causation. It includes four short "Reflections" that explore the significance of the concept for literature, the history of music, the history of science, and contemporary art theory.
Download or read book Efficient Causality in Aristotle and St Thomas written by Francis Xavier Meehan and published by . This book was released on 1940 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal Powers written by Gloria Frost and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-11 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reconstructs and analyses Aquinas's theories of efficient causation and causal powers.
Download or read book Thinking about Causes written by Peter Machamer and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging as a hot topic in the mid-twentieth century, causality is one of the most frequently discussed issues in contemporary philosophy. Causality has been a central concept in philosophy as well as in the sciences, especially the natural sciences, dating back to its beginning in Greek thought. David Hume famously claimed that causality is the cement of the universe. In general terms, it links eventualities, predicts the consequences of action, and is the cognitive basis for the acquisition and the use of categories and concepts in the child. Indeed, how could one answer why-questions, around which early rational thought begins to revolve, without hitting on the relationships between reason and consequence, cause and effect, or without drawing these distinctions? But a comprehensive definition of causality has been notoriously hard to provide, and virtually every aspect of causation has been subject to much debate and analysis.Thinking About Causes brings together top philosophers from the United States and Europe to focus on causality as a major force in philosophical and scientific thought. Topics addressed include: ancient Stoicism and moral philosophy; the case of sacramental causality; traditional causal concepts in Descartes; Kant on transcendental laws; the influence of J. S. Mill's politics on his concept of causation; plurality in causality; causality in modern physics; causality in economics; and the concept of free will.Taken together, the essays in this collection from the Pittsburgh -Konstanz series provide the best current thinking about causality, especially as it relates to the philosophy of science.
Download or read book Efficient Causality in the Philosophy written by George Marcil and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Descartes on Causation written by Tad M. Schmaltz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a systematic study of Descartes' theory of causation and its relation to the medieval and early modern scholastic philosophy that provides its proper historical context. The argument presented here is that even though Descartes offered a dualistic ontology that differs radically from what we find in scholasticism, his views on causation were profoundly influenced by scholastic thought on this issue. This influence is evident not only in his affirmation in the Meditations of the abstract scholastic axioms that a cause must contain the reality of its effects and that conservation does not differ in reality from creation, but also in the details of the accounts of body-body interaction in his physics, of mind-body interaction in his psychology, and of the causation that he took to be involved in free human action. In contrast to those who have read Descartes as endorsing the "occasionalist" conclusion that God is the only real cause, a central thesis of this study is that he accepted what in the context of scholastic debates regarding causation is the antipode of occasionalism, namely, the view that creatures rather than God are the causal source of natural change. What emerges from the defense of this interpretation of Descartes is a new understanding of his contribution to modern thought on causation.
Download or read book Skepticism Causality and Skepticism about Causality Volume 10 written by Alexander W. Hall and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-11 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Skepticism, Causality and Skepticism about Causality studies the interrelated themes of causality and skepticism in contemporary, early modern and medieval philosophy. Thomas Aquinas’s celebrated proofs of the existence of God (the Five Ways of the Summa Theologica) rely in part on an Aristotelian notion of synchronous causality, wherein the things that exist and persist require an accounting that ultimately terminates in the ongoing activity of a first mover, as the existence and persistence of an ecosystem is traceable to the sun. By contrast, in David Hume’s early modern account, causality consists in the regularity of successive events (a rolling billiard ball’s collision with a stationary one is always followed by the movement of the latter). Moreover, Newtonian and Einsteinian accounts respectively suggest that motion, once initiated, requires no explanation. In light of these developments, the first set of essays in this volume re-evaluates the Aristotelian paradigm and its relation to modern science, contending that in some fields (such as ecology, thermodynamics or information theory) contemporary science still preserves some intuitions about causality that support Aquinas’s deliberations. Hume’s skepticism about causality is heir to late medieval and early modern development that transformed not only the notion of causality in general, but also the idea of the causal connections between our cognitive faculties, God, and the world in particular, giving rise to extreme, solipsistic forms of skepticism, such as Descartes’ Demon skepticism. The second set of essays considers whether Aquinas’s thought would be susceptible in some ways to this form of skepticism, and what motivated, just a couple of generations later, the turn to epistemology already involving this sort of skepticism.
Download or read book Human Action in Thomas Aquinas John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham written by Thomas Michael Osborne and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sets out a thematic presentation of human action, especially as it relates to morality, in the three most significant figures in Medieval Scholastic thought: Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham
Download or read book Efficient Causality in Aristotle and Saint Thomas written by Francis X. Meehan and published by . This book was released on 1940 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Causation Freedom and Determinism written by Mortimer Taube and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1936, divides into roughly two parts: a re-examination of historical material; and a positive theory of causation suggested by the results of this re-examination. The historical study discloses an ambiguity in the meanings of causation and determinism; it discloses also that this ambiguity is transferred to the meaning of freedom.
Download or read book Final Causality in Nature and Human Affairs written by Richard F. Hassing and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2018-03-02 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teleology - the inquiry into the goals or goods at which nature, history, God, and human beings aim - is among the most fundamental yet controversial themes in the history of philosophy. Are there ends in nonhuman nature? Does human history have a goal? Do humanly unintended events of great significance express some sort of purpose? Do human beings have ends prior to choice? The essays in this volume address the abiding questions of final causality. The chapters are arranged in historical order from Aristotle through Hegel to contemporary anthropic-principle cosmology.
Download or read book Making Things Happen written by James Woodward and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-27 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Making Things Happen, James Woodward develops a new and ambitious comprehensive theory of causation and explanation that draws on literature from a variety of disciplines and which applies to a wide variety of claims in science and everyday life. His theory is a manipulationist account, proposing that causal and explanatory relationships are relationships that are potentially exploitable for purposes of manipulation and control. This account has its roots in the commonsense idea that causes are means for bringing about effects; but it also draws on a long tradition of work in experimental design, econometrics, and statistics. Woodward shows how these ideas may be generalized to other areas of science from the social scientific and biomedical contexts for which they were originally designed. He also provides philosophical foundations for the manipulationist approach, drawing out its implications, comparing it with alternative approaches, and defending it from common criticisms. In doing so, he shows how the manipulationist account both illuminates important features of successful causal explanation in the natural and social sciences, and avoids the counterexamples and difficulties that infect alternative approaches, from the deductive-nomological model onwards. Making Things Happen will interest philosophers working in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of social science, and metaphysics, and as well as anyone interested in causation, explanation, and scientific methodology.
Download or read book Efficient Causality and Other Philosophical Aspects of Current Physical Theory written by Joseph Schneider and published by . This book was released on 1938 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality written by Eric Watkins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book about Kant's views on causality as understood in their proper historical context.
Download or read book Causation and Modern Philosophy written by Keith Allen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together a collection of new essays by leading scholars on the subject of causation in the early modern period, from Descartes to Lady Mary Shepherd. Aimed at researchers, graduate students and advanced undergraduates, the volume advances the understanding of early modern discussions of causation, and situates these discussions in the wider context of early modern philosophy and science. Specifically, the volume contains essays on key early modern thinkers, such as Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant. It also contains essays that examine the important contributions to the causation debate of less widely discussed figures, including Louis la Forge, Thomas Brown and Lady Mary Shepherd.
Download or read book Formal Causes written by Michael T. Ferejohn and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael T. Ferejohn presents a new analysis of Aristotle's theory of explanation and scientific knowledge, in the context of its Socratic roots. Ferejohn shows how Aristotle resolves the tension between his commitment to the formal-case model of explanation and his recognition of the role of efficient causes in explaining natural phenomena.
