Many years ago, C.B. Martin drew our attention to the possibility of ‘finkish’ dispositions: dispositions which, if put to the test would not be manifested, but rather would disappear. Thus if x if finkishly disposed to give response r to stimulus s, it is not so that if x were subjected to stimulus r, x would give response z; so finkish dispositions afford a counter‐example to the simplest conditional analysis of dispositions. Martin went on to suggest that finkish dispositions required (...) a theory of primitive causal powers; there, I think, he was mistaken. All that they require is an improved conditional analysis, and this improved analysis can be built upon whatever treatments of properties and of laws we may favour on other grounds. (shrink)

This article focuses on one aspect of the late mediaeval debate over divine power, as it was discussed by Oxford philosophers Walter Chatton (d. 1343) and William Ockham (d. 1347). Chatton and Ockham would have agreed, for example, that God is ultimately responsible for the existence of the works of Pablo Picasso, but they would not agree over wheher it violates God's omnipotence to say that he cannot make something that Picasso made, for example, the painting Guernica, without using Picasso (...) himself as an intermediate cause. The context of their dispute was a larger debate regarding the ontological status of relations. This article (1) explains how these two issues, omnipotence and relations, became so interestingly tangled together, (2) tries to see which of the two men mentioned above got the better of their exchange, and finally (3) draws out some important consequences for fourteenth-century discussions of causality, occasionalism, and omnipotence. (shrink)

The present text contains a critical edition of Peter of Palude’s question of divine concurrence, found in his Sentences commentary, book II, d. 1, q. 4. The question concerns whether God is immediately active in every action of a creature, and if yes, how we should understand this divine concurrence. Peter, just as elsewhere in his commentary, considers at length the opinions of other thinkers — especially those of Giles of Rome, Durand of St.-Pourçain, and Thomas Aquinas — and develops (...) his own answer as a response to theirs. Thus, while Giles maintained that God acts uniformly in every instance of natural causation just as the sun acts uniformly by giving the same light to everything, Peter (following Durand) argues that this is incompatible with the divine creation of multiple things. Second, while Durand maintained that God is only mediately active in the actions of creatures, Peter rejects this opinion because it cannot account for miracles contra naturam (such as the three young men in Nebuchadnezzar’s fire), and because he thinks that God’s immediate action follows from his immediate conservation of creatures. Third, Peter presents Aquinas’s position in detail, and defends it against Durand’s objections; according to this position, God immediately conserves and concurs with every creature, with an action that is numerically distinct from that of the secondary agent. Although as a result of his extensive borrowing, Peter’s text might not be regarded as immensely original, it provides an interesting case study of the Dominican reaction against Durand in the early 1300’s. (shrink)

In the not too distant past, it was common to treat Hume's skeptical doubts regarding the justification of our beliefs in causal connections—understood as necessary connections between objects or events—as having appeared per conceptionem immaculatam in his post-Cartesian mind. Thanks to recent efforts by scholars in early modern philosophy, however, we are now more informed about the roots of Hume's conclusions in Cartesian thought itself, especially the influence of Malebranche and his arguments for occasionalism. And by the research of historians (...) of Medieval philosophy we are reminded that many aspects of seventeenth-century occasionalism, in turn, have their ancestry in Latin and Arabic thought of the Middle Ages. In this paper I offer a small contribution to the overall project of illuminating the precedents in Medieval philosophy for the theses and arguments in Malebranche that so clearly influenced the most important and influential philosophical analysis of causation ever. There is a tradition here, where the goal is to undermine claims to discover real causal relations or powers in nature. I will concentrate on one particular aspect or tool of that tradition: the negative argument that we can never perceive a sufficiently necessary connection between any two natural objects or events. (shrink)

The medieval notion of instrumental cause is not limited to what we call today “instruments” or “tools.” It extends way beyond the realm of technology and includes natural entities, for instance, the accidents by which a substance acts on another substance, sensible species in the air acting on a visual faculty, sacraments, bodily organs, and sometimes creatures with respect to God’s action. In all these cases, instrumental causes, like secondary causes in general, are subordinated to a principal cause and contribute (...) to its action and effects. However, the manner in which they do so makes them different from regular secondary causes, and the specifics are not easy to pinpoint. At the occasion of discussions about creation ex nihilo and sacraments, John Duns Scotus challenges Thomas Aquinas’s theory of instrumental causality. Whereas Aquinas does not strongly distinguish between artifacts and natural agents, and postulates a complex superposition of layers of causation, Scotus offers a novel view that clearly separates artificial instrumentality and natural instrumentality, and in both cases explains causation with great economy. Scotus’s in-depth discussion has far-reaching implications. It completely transforms the understanding of instrumental causality in general. (shrink)

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 (...) agent” as subject. This paper proposes a solution for how to reconcile Aquinas’ varying claims about what transeunt causal activity is in reality. In addition to advancing understanding of Aquinas’ views on causal activity, the paper also offers insights into more general topics in his thought, such as the relationship between actualities and accidents and the nature of extrinsic accidents. (shrink)

My topic is God's activity in the ordinary course of nature. The precise mode of this activity has been the subject of prolonged debates within every major theistic intellectual tradition, though it is within the Catholic tradition that the discussion has been carried on with the most philosophical sophistication. The problem, in its simplest form, is this: Given the fundamental theistic tenet that God is the provident Lord of nature, the First Efficient Cause who creates the universe, sustains it in (...) being, and exists in all things by His essence, presence, and power,1 how exactly do the actions of secondary (i.e., created) causes fit in with God's own activity in the ordinary course of nature? Or, to put it a bit more neutrally, how exactly is God's own action as the First Cause in nature related to the causal activity, if any , of His creatures? (shrink)

This paper discusses Scotus’s view of how God knows sins by analyzing texts from his discussions of God’s permission of sin and predestination. I show that Scotus departed from his standard theory of how God knows contingents when explaining how God knows sins. God cannot know sins by knowing a first-order act of his will, as he knows other contingents according to Scotus, since God does not directly will sins. I suggest that Scotus’s recognition that his standard theory of God’s (...) knowledge of contingents could not account for how God knows sins may have contributed to his ultimate rejection of this theory. (shrink)

After an exposition of some key concepts in scholastic ontology, this paper examines four arguments presented by Francisco Suarez for the thesis, commonly held by Christian Aristotelians, that God's causal contribution to effects occurring in the ordinary course of nature goes beyond His merely conserving created substances along with their active and passive causal powers. The postulation of a further causal contribution, known as God's general concurrence (or general concourse), can be viewed as an attempt to accommodate an element of (...) truth present in occasionalist accounts of divine causality. (shrink)

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 (...) thesis. The second part discusses Scotus’ attack on this thesis. As this paper shows, Scotus argues, against Aquinas and other scholastics, that action and passion are discrete entities inhering in two distinct bearers: action in the agent and passion in the patient. (shrink)

The relationship between divine and created causality was widely discussed in medieval and early modern philosophy. Contemporary scholars of these discussions typically stake out three possible positions: occasionalism, concurrentism, and mere-conservationism. It is regularly claimed that virtually no medieval thinker adopted the final view which denies that God is an immediate active cause of creaturely actions. The main aim of this paper is to further understanding of the medieval causality debate, and particularly the mere-conservationist position, by analysing Peter John Olivi's (...) neglected defence of it. The paper also includes discussion of Thomas Aquinas's arguments for concurrentism and an analysis of whether Olivi's objections refute his position. (shrink)

According to theological consensus at least from the thirteenth century, at the End of Times our body will be resurrected and reunited with our soul. The resurrected body, although numerically identical to our present one, will be quite different: it will possess clarity, agility, subtility, and the inability to suffer. It is the last of these characteristics that will be of most concern in the present article. There are two reasons why impassibility presents a problem in the medieval framework. The (...) first has to do with how to characterize impassibility more precisely; the second arises because at first it may seem that impassibility is not metaphysically possible at all. The article will look at three attempts to tackle these problems: those of Thomas Aquinas, Durand of St.-Pourçain, and Peter of Palude. As the article aims to show, looking at how causal powers work on the New Earth may shed some light on how medieval thinkers thought they worked on the present one. (shrink)

In recent years more and more scholars of early modern philosophy have come to acknowledge that our understanding of Descartes’s thought benefits greatly from consideration of his intellectual background. Research in this direction has taken off, but much work remains to be done. Dennis Des Chene offers a major contribution to this enterprise. This erudite book is the result of a very impressive body of research into a number of late Aristotelian scholastics, some fairly well known, such as Suárez, others (...) quite obscure. Two thirds of the book is devoted to the Aristotelians, with occasional references to Descartes; the last third focuses on Descartes, although there still much Aristotelian ground is covered. Des Chene indicates three major themes for his book: natural change and agency, the structure of material substance, and finality. (shrink)

The paper deals with the problem of divine causation in relation to created agents in general and human rational agents in particular. Beyond creation and conservation, Aquinas specifies divine contribution to created agents’ operation as application in the role of the first cause and the operation of the principal cause employing an instrumental cause. It is especially the latter which is open to varying interpretation and which might be potentially threatening to human freedom. There are different readings of what it (...) is for the secondary agent to “act through the power of the principal cause”. Either the divine cause causes only the existence of the effect of the secondary cause, or it also causes the cause to operate in the sense that it determines its outcome. The latter seems to contradict human freedom. Both readings of Aquinas were developed in the latter half of the sixteenth century within scholastic philosophy and theology. (shrink)

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. (shrink)