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  1. Causes as powers: Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum: Getting causes from powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 272pp, £35 HB. [REVIEW]Jennifer McKitrick, Anna Marmodoro, Stephen Mumford & Rani Lill Anjum - 2013 - Metascience 22 (3):545-559.
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  • Action, passion, power.David S. Oderberg - 2024 - Noûs.
    The active/passive distinction, once a hallmark of classical metaphysics, has largely been discarded from contemporary thought. The revival of powers theory has not seen an equally vigorous rehabilitation of the real distinction between active and passive powers. I begin an analysis and vindication with a critique of E.J. Lowe's discussion. I then argue that the active/passive problem is a metaphysical one, not a logical or logico‐linguistic one, and so logic is impotent to solve it. Following this is a discussion of (...)
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  • How the Soul Uses Its Tools: Flexible Agency in Aristotle’s Account of Animal Generation.Emily Kress - 2023 - Phronesis 68 (3):293-325.
    Aristotle claims that just as a builder uses ‘tools’ to build a house, so too the soul ‘use[s] heat and coldness as tools’ to build an animal (Generation of Animals 740b25–34). I consider two questions about this claim: (1) what sorts of things does the soul use, and what is it for things like them to be organized? and (2) what philosophical work does this sort of organization do in Aristotle’s account of animal generation? I argue that the soul needs (...)
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  • Can Causal Powers Cause Their Effects?Andrea Raimondi - 2022 - Metaphysica 23 (2):455-473.
    Causal Dispositionalism provides an account of causation based on an ontology of causal powers, properties with causal essence. According to the account, causation can be analysed in terms of the interaction of powers and its subsequent production of their effect. Recently, Baltimore, J. A. has raised a challenge against two competing approaches, the compositional view and the mutual manifestation view, to explain what makes powers interactive – the interaction gap. In this paper, we raise the challenge of explaining what makes (...)
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  • Aristotle’s Solution to Zeno’s Arrow Paradox and its Implications.John M. Pemberton - 2022 - Ancient Philosophy Today 4 (1):73-95.
    Aristotle’s solution to Zeno’s arrow paradox differs markedly from the so called at-at solution championed by Russell, which has become the orthodox view in contemporary philosophy. The latter supposes that motion consists in simply being at different places at different times. It can boast parsimony because it eliminates velocity from the ontology. Aristotle, by contrast, solves the paradox by denying that the flight of the arrow is composed of instants; rather, on my reading, he holds that the flight is a (...)
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  • Powers: The No-Successor Problem.John Pemberton - 2021 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (2):213-230.
    This essay considers the implications for the powers metaphysic of the no-successor problem: As there are no successors in the set of real numbers, one state cannot occur just after another in continuous time without there being a gap between the two. I show how the no-successor problem sets challenges for various accounts of the manifestation of powers. For powers that give rise to a manifestation that is a new state, the challenge of no-successors is similar to that faced on (...)
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  • Aristotle's Ontology of Change.Mark Sentesy - 2020 - Chicago, IL, USA: Northwestern University Press.
    This book investigates what change is, according to Aristotle, and how it affects his conception of being. Mark Sentesy argues that change leads Aristotle to develop first-order metaphysical concepts such as matter, potency, actuality, sources of being, and the teleology of emerging things. He shows that Aristotle’s distinctive ontological claim—that being is inescapably diverse in kind—is anchored in his argument for the existence of change. -/- Aristotle may be the only thinker to have given a noncircular definition of change. When (...)
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  • John Duns Scotus versus Thomas Aquinas on action-passion identity.Can Laurens Löwe - 2018 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (6):1027-1044.
    ABSTRACTThis paper examines Thomas Aquinas’ and John Duns Scotus’ respective views on the action-passion identity thesis. This thesis, which goes back to Aristotle, states that when an agent causes a change in a patient, then the agent’s causing of the change is identical to the patient’s undergoing of said change. Action and passion are, on this view, one and the same change in the patient, albeit under two distinct descriptions. The first part of the paper considers Aquinas’ defence of this (...)
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  • Aquinas’ Ontology of Transeunt Causal Activity.Gloria Frost - 2018 - Vivarium 56 (1-2):47-82.
    This paper reconstructs and analyzes Thomas Aquinas’ intriguing views on transeunt causal activity, which have been the subject of an interpretive debate spanning from the fifteenth century up until the present. In his Physics commentary, Aquinas defends the Aristotelian positions that the actualization of an agent’s active potential is the motion that it causes in its patient and action and passion are the same motion. Yet, in other texts, Aquinas claims that action differs from passion and “action is in the (...)
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  • Change, Agency and the Incomplete in Aristotle.Andreas Anagnostopoulos - 2017 - Phronesis 62 (2):170-209.
    Aristotle’s most fundamental distinction between changes and other activities is not that ofMetaphysicsΘ.6, between end-exclusive and end-inclusive activities, but one implicit inPhysics3.1’s definition of change, between the activity of something incomplete and the activity of something complete. Notably, only the latter distinction can account for Aristotle’s view, inPhysics3.3, that ‘agency’—effecting change in something, e.g. teaching—does not qualify strictly as a change. This distinction informsDe Anima2.5 and imparts unity to Aristotle’s extended treatment of change inPhysics3.1-3.
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  • Aristotle on Action and Agency.Harry Sakari Alanen - 2022 - Dissertation, Oxford University
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  • The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning.Michael Waldmann (ed.) - 2017 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    Causal reasoning is one of our most central cognitive competencies, enabling us to adapt to our world. Causal knowledge allows us to predict future events, or diagnose the causes of observed facts. We plan actions and solve problems using knowledge about cause-effect relations. Without our ability to discover and empirically test causal theories, we would not have made progress in various empirical sciences. In the past decades, the important role of causal knowledge has been discovered in many areas of cognitive (...)
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  • Aristotle’s Alternative to Enduring and Perduring: Lasting.John M. Pemberton - 2022 - Ancient Philosophy Today 4 (2):217-236.
    Although Aristotle does not explicitly address persistence, his account of persisting may be derived from a careful consideration of his account of change. On my interpretation, he supposes that motions are mereological unities of their potential temporal parts – I dub such mereological unities ‘lasting’. Aristotle’s persisting things, too, are lasting, I argue. Lasting things are unlike enduring things in that they have temporal parts; and unlike perduring things in that their temporal parts are not actual, but rather are potential. (...)
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  • Suárez on the Possibility of Causal Overdetermination.Han Thomas Adriaenssen - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    This paper studies Francisco Suárez's defence of the possibility of causal overdetermination. I show that, according to Suárez, the main arguments against the possibility of causal overdetermination rely on (i) a flawed conception of causal dependence and (ii) a flawed ontology of action. I argue that his objections to (i) and (ii) amount to a significant challenge to his opponents’ case against the possibility of causal overdetermination.
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  • Suárez's Non-Reductive Theory of Efficient Causation.Jacob Tuttle - 2016 - Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 4 (1):125-158.
    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 (...)
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  • ἡ κίνησις τῆς τέχνης: Crafts and Souls as Principles of Change.Patricio A. Fernandez & Jorge Mittelmann - 2017 - Phronesis 62 (2):136-169.
    Aristotle’s soul is a first principle (an ‘efficient cause’) of every vital change in an animal, in the way that a craft is a cause of its product’s coming-to-be. We argue that the soul’s causal efficacy cannot therefore be reduced to the formal constitution of vital phenomena, or to discrete interventions into independently constituted processes, but involves the exercise of vital powers. This reading does better justice to Aristotle’s conception of craft as a rational productive disposition; and it captures the (...)
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  • The self and its causal powers between metaphysics and science.Rodolfo Giorgi & Andrea Lavazza - 2020 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-25.
    According to the thesis of powerism, our world is pervaded by causal powers which are metaphysically basic. The aim of this paper is to defend the existence of the self, defined as a substantial entity, and its mental powers. This claim, which may seem a bold one, should not be deemed as inconsistent with scientific evidence. In fact, this approach does not ignore empirical knowledge, but is not bound only to it in order to understand entities, properties, and the relationship (...)
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