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Descartes on Causation

Studia Leibnitiana 38 (2):248-250 (2006)

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  1. Occasionalism.Sukjae Lee - 2009 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Why Every Belief is a Choice: Descartes’ Doxastic Voluntarism Reconsidered.Mark Boespflug - 2023 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (2):158-178.
    Descartes appears to hold that everything we believe is the product of a voluntary choice. Scholars have been reluctant to take this particularly radical version of doxastic voluntarism as Descartes’ considered position. I argue that once Descartes’ compatibilist conception of free will as well as his position on the ‘freedom of indifference’ are taken into account, the primary motivations for the rejection of the aforementioned radical version of doxastic voluntarism lose their force. Consequently, we may take Descartes at his word (...)
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  • Descartes on Formal Causation.Travis Tanner - 2019 - In Jorge Secada & Cecilia Wee (eds.), The Cartesian Mind. Routledge.
    Descartes’s causal theory is often taken to announce modernity by radically breaking with the Aristotelian past. Specifically, Descartes is often taken to reject the full Aristotelian causal theory in favor of the efficient causes characteristic of mechanistic physics and the activity of minds. In this chapter, I argue against this view by showing that Descartes endorses an avowedly Aristotelian notion of formal causation. First, I articulate Cartesian formal causation in light of its Aristotelian background, and I show that Descartes endorses (...)
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  • How physics flew the philosophers' nest.Katherine Brading - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 88 (C):312-20.
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  • General Relativity, Mental Causation, and Energy Conservation.J. Brian Pitts - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (4):1931-1973.
    The conservation of energy and momentum have been viewed as undermining Cartesian mental causation since the 1690s. Modern discussions of the topic tend to use mid-nineteenth century physics, neglecting both locality and Noether’s theorem and its converse. The relevance of General Relativity has rarely been considered. But a few authors have proposed that the non-localizability of gravitational energy and consequent lack of physically meaningful local conservation laws answers the conservation objection to mental causation: conservation already fails in GR, so there (...)
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  • Berkeley on Voluntary Motion: A Conservationist Account.Takaharu Oda - 2018 - Ruch Filozoficzny 74 (4):71–98.
    A plausible reading of Berkeley’s view of voluntary motion is occasionalism; this, however, leads to a specious conclusion against his argument of human action. Differing from an unqualified occasionalist reading, I consider the alternative reading that Berkeley is a conservationist regarding bodily motion by the human mind at will. That is, finite minds (spirits) immediately cause motions in their body parts, albeit under the divine conservation. My argument then comports with the conservationist reading from three perspectives: (i) theodicy that the (...)
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  • Naked wax and necessary existence: modal voluntarism and Descartes’s motives.Jason Jordan - 2018 - Intellectual History Review 28 (4):477-513.
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  • Descartes on the Metaphysics of the Material World.Tad M. Schmaltz - 2018 - Philosophical Review 127 (1):1-40.
    It is a matter of continuing scholarly dispute whether Descartes offers a metaphysics of the material world that is “monist” or “pluralist.” One passage that has become crucial to this debate is from the Synopsis of the Meditations, in which Descartes argues that since “body taken in general” is a substance, and since all substances are “by their nature incorruptible,” this sort of body is incorruptible as well. In this article I defend a pluralist reading of this passage, according to (...)
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  • Descartes and the Possibility of Enlightened Freedom.Daniel Fogal - 2017 - Res Philosophica 94 (4):499-534.
    This paper offers a novel interpretation of Descartes's conception of freedom that resolves an important tension at the heart of his view. It does so by appealing to the important but overlooked distinction between possessing a power, exercising a power, and being in a position to exercise a power.
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  • Additive Theories of Rationality: A Critique.Matthew Boyle - 2016 - European Journal of Philosophy 24 (3):527-555.
    Additive theories of rationality, as I use the term, are theories that hold that an account of our capacity to reflect on perceptually-given reasons for belief and desire-based reasons for action can begin with an account of what it is to perceive and desire, in terms that do not presuppose any connection to the capacity to reflect on reasons, and then can add an account of the capacity for rational reflection, conceived as an independent capacity to ‘monitor’ and ‘regulate’ our (...)
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  • Descartes on Human Freedom.Marie Jayasekera - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (8):527-539.
    In this paper, I explore René Descartes' conception of human freedom. I begin with the key interpretive challenges of Descartes' remarks and then turn to two foundational issues in the secondary literature: the philosophical backdrop of Descartes' remarks and the notions of freedom that commentators have used to characterize Descartes. The remainder of the paper is focused on the main current debate: Descartes' position on the relationship between freedom and determinism.
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  • Moving Cartesian Bodies.Tyler Doggett - manuscript
    Argues that Descartes's commitment to mind-body causation leads to a commitment to body-body causation.
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  • Newton and Descartes: Theology and natural philosophy.Andrew Janiak - 2012 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 50 (3):414-435.
    Scholars have long recognized that Newton regarded Descartes as his principal philosophical interlocutor when composing the first edition of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. The arguments in the Scholium on space and time, for instance, can profitably be interpreted as focusing on the conception of space and motion in part two of Descartes's Principles of Philosophy (1644). What is less well known, however, is that this Cartesian conception, along with Descartes's attempt to avoid Galileo's fate in 1633, serves as (...)
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  • Quasi-Occasionalistic Causation in the Philosophy of René Descartes.Hasan Ahmadizade - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Theological Research 22 (1):127-146.
    Introduction The discussion of “self-knowledge” as a philosophical issue begins with an intuition. This intuition is based on the fact that our knowledge of our mental states or our knowledge in relation to statements like: “I know that I am happy,” is a particular knowledge that is distinct from the rest of our knowledge. It seems that in order to gain knowledge of ourselves, we do not need to go through those processes that we go through in order to gain (...)
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  • Conservation of Energy: Missing Features in Its Nature and Justification and Why They Matter.J. Brian Pitts - 2020 - Foundations of Science 26 (3):559-584.
    Misconceptions about energy conservation abound due to the gap between physics and secondary school chemistry. This paper surveys this difference and its relevance to the 1690s–2010s Leibnizian argument that mind-body interaction is impossible due to conservation laws. Justifications for energy conservation are partly empirical, such as Joule’s paddle wheel experiment, and partly theoretical, such as Lagrange’s statement in 1811 that energy is conserved if the potential energy does not depend on time. In 1918 Noether generalized results like Lagrange’s and proved (...)
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  • Cudworth on Freewill.Matthew A. Leisinger - 2021 - Philosophers' Imprint 21 (1):1-25.
    In his unpublished freewill manuscripts, Ralph Cudworth seeks to complete the project that he begins in The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) by arguing for an account of human liberty that avoids the opposing poles of necessitarianism and indifferency. I argue that Cudworth’s account rests upon a crucial distinction between the will and the power of freewill. Whereas we necessarily will the greater apparent good, freewill is a more fundamental power by which we endeavour to discern the greater (...)
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  • Priestley on materialism and the essence of God.Falk Wunderlich - 2020 - Intellectual History Review 30 (1):49-64.
    The paper focuses on Priestley’s complex views on the essence of God in connection with his materialism, elaborated in the Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777/ 1782). This issue is crucial if one wishes to get a clear idea of what Priestley’s materialism amounts to; whether it is mainly a thesis about the material grounds of the human mind (“psychological materialism”), or a more far-reaching one about what kind of substances exist in the world (a version of “ontological materialism”). (...)
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  • Hipótesis y certeza moral: la crítica de Descartes a las causas eficientes.Sergio García Rodríguez - 2017 - Eidos: Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad Del Norte 27:174-198.
    RESUMEN La interpretación habitual de Descartes sostiene que la nueva ciencia cartesiana es resultado del remplazo, en las explicaciones científicas, de las causas finales y formales por las causas eficientes. Si bien dicha afirmación en líneas generales es correcta, se ha tendido a asumir que las causas eficientes no entrañan problema alguno. Este artículo desea cuestionar dicha asunción, poniendo de manifiesto una serie de problemáticas concernientes a la cognoscibilidad de las causas eficientes. ABSTRACT The common interpretation of Descartes argues that (...)
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  • Substance and Independence in Descartes.Anat Schechtman - 2016 - Philosophical Review 125 (2):155-204.
    Descartes notoriously characterizes substance in two ways: first, as an ultimate subject of properties ; second, as an independent entity. The characterizations have appeared to many to diverge on the definition as well as the scope of the notion of substance. For it is often thought that the ultimate subject of properties need not—and, in some cases, cannot—be independent. Drawing on a suite of historical, textual, and philosophical considerations, this essay argues for an interpretation that reconciles Descartes's two characterizations. It (...)
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  • God and the natural world in the seventeenth century: Space, time, and causality.Geoffrey Gorham - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (5):859-872.
    The employment by seventeenth-century natural philosophers of stock theological notions like creation, immensity, and eternity in the articulation and justification of emerging physical programs disrupted a delicate but longstanding balance between transcendent and immanent conceptions of God. By playing a prominent (if not always leading) role in many of the major scientific developments of the period, God became more intimately involved with natural processes than at any time since antiquity. In this discussion, I am particularly concerned with the causal and (...)
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  • Aquinas on Dualist Mental Causation.Can Laurens Löwe - 2023 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 40 (2):163-190.
    This paper examines Aquinas's theory of dualist mental causation, that is, his theory of how human beings can efficiently cause changes in their bodies in virtue of two non-physical mental states of theirs, specifically an act of the intellect and an act of the will. It is first shown that Aquinas's hylomorphism does not lie at the heart of this theory. Rather, a relation that he calls “contact of power” (tactus virtutis) does. The remainder of the paper then investigates the (...)
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  • Cartesian Aseity in the Third Meditation.Landon McBrayer - 2018 - Journal of Analytic Theology 6:217-233.
    The notion that something can exist a se is central to Descartes’s overall metaphysics of causation. In the Meditations, divine aseity plays the role of explaining not only God’s existence but ultimately the existence of everything else apart from God. Yet in the Meditations proper, as well as in the early Replies, Descartes does little to clarify exactly what his view of divine aseity is and how it might differ from the sort of aseity commonly posited by the Scholastics. Despite (...)
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  • Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy in Descartes and Newton.Andrew Janiak - 2013 - Foundations of Science 18 (3):403-417.
    This paper compares Newton’s and Descartes’s conceptions of the complex relationship between physics and metaphysics.
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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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  • Do you need to know in order to act? The case for a Suárezian legacy in early modern occasionalism.Andrea Sangiacomo - 2023 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 61 (3):506-526.
    The goal of this article is to suggest that in early modern discussions of agency and causal efficacy it is possible to detect an attempt at pushing to its extreme consequences a specific account of agency and causality that was developed in late scholastic thought. More specifically, the article examines Francisco Suárez's (1548–1617) account of freedom and how this relates to his views on efficient causality. Despite Suárez's careful way of differentiating between natural (necessary) and human (free) agents, his view (...)
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  • The problem of mind-body interaction and the causal principle of Descartes’s Third Meditation.Dmytro Sepetyi - 2021 - Sententiae 40 (1):28-43.
    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, (...)
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  • El misterioso compatibilismo cartesiano.Ezequiel Zerbudis - 2020 - Cuadernos Filosóficos / Segunda Época 16:1-16.
    I argue in this paper that Descartes is committed both to a compatibilist view concerning the relation between free will and divine preordination, namely, one according to which both of these views come out true, and to a libertarian view as regards human free will. I defend here that what allows our author to maintain both of these committments is what I call Mysterism, namely, the view according to which God's immense and incomprehensible nature explains our incapacity to understand fully (...)
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  • Imagination, metaphysics, mathematics: Descartes’s arguments for the Vortex Hypothesis.Mary Domski - 2019 - Synthese 196 (9):3505-3526.
    In this paper, I examine the manner in which Descartes defends his Vortex Hypothesis in Part III of the Principles of Philosophy, and expand on Ernan McMullin’s characterization of the methodology that Descartes uses to support his planetary system. McMullin illuminates the connection between the deductive method of Part III and the method Descartes uses in earlier portions of the Principles, and he brings needed light to the role that imaginative constructions play in Descartes’s explanations of the phenomena. I develop (...)
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  • Descartes' Causal Principle and the Case of Body-to-Mind Causation1.Raffaella De Rosa - 2013 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 43 (4):438-459.
    It is a common view that Descartes' causal principle is to be understood in light of a similarity condition that accounts for how finite causes contribute to an explanation of their effects. This paper challenges this common view and offers a sui generis reading of Descartes' views on causation that has also the advantage of solving the two exegetical issues of whether Descartes thought of the body-to-mind relation in occasionalist or causal terms and of whether Descartes regarded sensory ideas innate (...)
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  • Defense of a Libertarian Interpretation of Descartes' Account of Judgment 1.Lex Newman - 2023 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 104 (3):597-621.
    Widespread scholarly agreement has it that Descartes' theory of judgment favors a compatibilist interpretation. This essay explains and rebuts the standard arguments made on behalf of compatibilist readings, while explaining and defending a libertarian interpretation. Along with relevant Fourth Meditation doctrines and texts, my analysis encompasses a much discussed 1645 letter discussing his account. Although some scholars view the letter as departing from the account of theMeditations, I argue that the two works present a consistent view – allowing us to (...)
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  • Backing into Spinozism.Samuel Newlands - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (3):511-537.
    One vexing strand of Spinozism asserts that God's nature is more expansive than traditionally conceived and includes properties like being extended. In this paper, I argue that prominent early moderns embrace metaphysical principles about causation, mental representation, and modality that pressure their advocates towards such an expansive account of God's nature in similar ways. I further argue that the main early modern escape route, captured in notions like “eminent containment,” fails to adequately relieve the metaphysical pressures towards Spinozism. The upshot (...)
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  • Obscurity and confusion: Nonreductionism in Descartes's biology and philosophy.Barnaby Hutchins - 2016 - Dissertation, Ghent University
    Descartes is usually taken to be a strict reductionist, and he frequently describes his work in reductionist terms. This dissertation, however, makes the case that he is a nonreductionist in certain areas of his philosophy and natural philosophy. This might seem like simple inconsistency, or a mismatch between Descartes's ambitions and his achievements. I argue that here it is more than that: nonreductionism is compatible with his wider commitments, and allowing for irreducibles increases the explanatory power of his system. Moreover, (...)
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  • Samuel Clarke on Agent Causation, Voluntarism, and Occasionalism.Andrea Sangiacomo - 2018 - Science in Context 31 (4):421-456.
    ArgumentThis paper argues that Samuel Clarke's account of agent causation (i) provides a philosophical basis for moderate voluntarism, and (ii) both leads to and benefits from the acceptance of partial occasionalism as a model of causation for material beings. Clarke's account of agent causation entails that for an agent to be properly called an agent (i.e. causally efficacious), it is essential that the agent is free to choose whether to act or not. This freedom is compatible with the existence of (...)
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  • A causalidade na esfera dos sentimentos segundo Descartes.Mariana De Almeida Campos - 2014 - Revista de Filosofia Aurora 26 (39):641.
    Este artigo examina quais teorias da causalidade explicam a ocorrência de sentimentos em animais e homens, segundo Descartes. Esse exame é feito à luz do debate entre as teorias ocasionalista e interacionista, bem como da posição de Descartes nesse debate. Nesse contexto, são discutidas algumas objeções a essas teorias, buscando determinar em quais pontos Descartes poderia ser considerado um adepto de uma ou da outra. A hipótese defendida é a de que ele adota certos aspectos da teoria interacionista para explicar (...)
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  • Between Cartesianism and orthodoxy: God and the problem of indifference in Christoph Wittich’s Anti-Spinoza.Yoshi Kato & Kuni Sakamoto - 2022 - Intellectual History Review 32 (2):239-257.
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  • Notes on the causal principle in Descartes’ Third Meditation.Fellipe Pinheiro de Oliveira - 2017 - Filosofia Unisinos 18 (1).
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  • How Newton Solved the Mind-Body Problem.Geoffrey A. Gorham - 2011 - History of Philosophy Quarterly 28 (1):21-44.
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