In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Not the End We Planned ForAnonymous FourIn 1997, my four–year–old daughter was diagnosed with a high–risk medulablastoma. She underwent the current treatment program at that time. She suffered multiple complications from the treatment and developed seizures, which caused her to lose her sight and 80% of her hearing. These all contributed to her manifesting many behavioral issues, making her a danger to herself and others. Also during this (...) time, she developed large amounts of brain atrophy from the maximum radiation dose she had been given. In August of 2010, Emily was still deteriorating, her seizures were uncontrollable, and her quality of life was extremely poor. A meeting to discuss how to care for my child if an acute crisis presented was held. The meeting included her parents, oncologist, endocrinologist, pediatric neurologist, social worker and the head of medical ethics. We discussed what course of action would be best for her nothing could be done to reverse her condition or prevent further deterioration. A POLST is a physician order for life sustaining treatment and is appropriate if the doctor feel that the patient has a good chance of death in the next year. The purpose of this document is to have a plan in place in case the patient has a life threatening crises. We chose to put a POLST in place with specific instructions not to intubate. This was a hard decision to make for a parent, but we all felt it was the best choice for her.A few months after the POLST was entered, in November, 2010, I came home from the store and my daughter’s caregivers told me she had complained of a headache different from her usual headaches. They gave her Tylenol with codeine and she went to bed about 4 p.m. When I checked her later she seemed fi ne, merely sleeping her headache off. We [End Page 30] decided to let her sleep some more. Around 8 p.m the caregivers came and got me because they could not wake her up to go to the bathroom, which was her normal routine. I immediately went to try and wake her up but could not. I ran my thumb up the bottom of her foot and there was no reflex response. I yelled for her father that we needed to immediately go to the hospital.We took her to the ER at the local hospital that treated her close to the house. We told them we did know what was happening with her but that there was a POLST in place in her chart. They started lines, a nasogastric tube, and sent her for a CT, which showed massive amounts of blood in her brain. I repeated again to the ER staff and physician that there was a POLST in place but no one acknowledged my statement. I asked for a different physician, one that would respect the POLST, and was told there was no one else nor was there a neurosurgeon available. The attending physician insisted she be intubated in order to be transferred to a partner hospital (more than 20 minutes away) where there was a neurosurgeon on duty. I asked him to please call her oncologist at which point he yelled at me that, “he was not calling anyone else and that she needed to be intubated and transferred to the other hospital.” By this time, four hours had passed and I knew she had not gotten any medication for pain, so I told the physician to go ahead and transfer her since I knew the hospital we were at would not admit her for palliative care. She was then intubated, in violation of the POLST, and transferred to the other hospital where the neurosurgeon there told us what we already feared: That she had experienced a massive bleed in her brain. We requested she be extubated and be given palliative care to make her comfortable until she passed away.It is tragic that our daughter’s last hours involved aggressive medical treatment. As parents we hoped to avoid any additional suffering for our child, we did everything we knew to do to insure aggressive... (shrink)

Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-How for Global Flourishing’s contributors describe ways of being that reflect a worldview that has guided humanity for 99% of human history; they describe the practical traditional wisdom stemming from Nature-based relational cultures that were or are guided by this worldview. Such cultures did not cause the kinds of anti-Nature and de-humanizing or inequitable policies and practices that now pervade our world. Far from romanticizing Indigenous histories, Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom offers facts about how human beings, (...) with our potential for good and evil behaviors, can live in relative harmony again. Contributions cover views from anthropology, psychology, sociology, leadership, native science, native history, native art. (shrink)

I will argue that Aristotle’s fourfold division of four causes naturally arises from a combination of two distinctions (a) between things and changes, and (b) between that which potentially is something and what it potentially is. Within this scheme, what is usually called the “efficient cause” is something that potentially is a certain natural change, and the “final cause” is, at least in a basic sense, what the efficient cause potentially is. I will further argue that the essences (...) of things and changes are not features or attributes of them, but paradigms that set the standards according to which these things and changes may be judged to be natural or typical. The “formal cause” of a natural thing will be shown to be its essence in this sense: it sets the standards of typicality that apply to instances of its kind. The final cause will be shown to set the standard of typicality for natural changes. When we understand Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes in this way, it becomes clear on what basis he could convincingly argue that final causality is operative in the whole of nature. (shrink)

Aristotle’s typical procedure is to identify something's four causes. Intentional action has typically been treated as an exception: most think that Aristotle has the standard causalist account, according to which an intentional action is a bodily movement efficiently caused by an attitude of the appropriate sort. I show that action is not an exception to Aristotle’s typical procedure: he has the resources to specify four causes of action, and thus to articulate a powerful theory of action (...) unlike any other on offer. (shrink)

The purpose of this brief note is to point out that the time-honored method of expounding Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes to beginning students is non-Aristotelian if not positively un-Aristotelian, and to raise the question whether, this being the case, the method should not be dropped.

This is partly a book about Aristotle’s four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final cause), partly a systematic discussion of the relation between form and matter, causation, and teleology. Its overall aim is to show that the four causes form a system, so that the form of a natural thing relates to its matter as the final cause of a natural process relates to its efficient cause. It reaches two highly distinctive conclusions. The first is that (...) the formal cause or essence of a thing is not a property but a generic thing. The second is that the final cause of a process is not its purpose but the course that processes of its kind typically take. (shrink)

This book examines Aristotle's four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final), offering a systematic discussion of the relation between form and matter, causation, taxonomy, and teleology. The overall aim is to show that the four causes form a system, so that the form of a natural thing relates to its matter as the final cause of a natural process relates to its efficient cause. Aristotle's Four Causes reaches two novel and distinctive conclusions. The first (...) is that the formal cause or essence of a natural thing is not a property of this thing but a generic natural thing. The second is that the final cause of a process is not its purpose but the course that processes of its kind typically take. (shrink)

Over time, Aristotle’s theory of four causes lost some of their original flexibility as an instrument to be applied analogically in diverse sciences. Enrico Berti’s distinction between physical and metaphysical causality in Aristotle provides insight into overcoming this crystallization. More importantly, the novelty of Aquinas’ metaphysics of actus essendi calls for a revision of the four causes: first, actus essendi is presented as actuating act and the source of the finite being’s ordered operation; the substantial essence (...) falls to potency and specifies the act of being; the efficient cause is the power of God insofar as he produces and moves the creature; divine exemplar causality is twofold ; the final causality concerns both the order and the governance of the world. In this paper, then, I outline this analogical passage from Aristotle’s physical causality to Aquinas’ metaphysical causality in reference to their modern interpreters, like Enrico Berti and Jan A. Aertsen. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine the reception and use of Aristotle’s four causes by twelfth- and thirteenth-century Latin Christian theologians, primarily at Paris. I pay special attention to the early thirteenth century, when Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy were officially prohibited in the French capital. By looking at a wide range of texts from both prominent and obscure theologians, I hope to contribute to an expanded view of the ways in which intellectuals in the Latin west received and (...) appropriated Aristotle’s ideas. (shrink)

This volume defends a novel approach to the philosophy of physics: it is the first book devoted to a comparative study of probability, causality, and propensity, and their various interrelations, within the context of contemporary physics -- particularly quantum and statistical physics. The philosophical debates and distinctions are firmly grounded upon examples from actual physics, thus exemplifying a robustly empiricist approach. The essays, by both prominent scholars in the field and promising young researchers, constitute a pioneer effort in bringing out (...) the connections between probabilistic, causal and dispositional aspects of the quantum domain. The book will appeal to specialists in philosophy and foundations of physics, philosophy of science in general, metaphysics, ontology of physics theories, and philosophy of probability. (shrink)

This volume defends a novel approach to the philosophy of physics: it is the first book devoted to a comparative study of probability, causality, and propensity, and their various interrelations, within the context of contemporary physics -- particularly quantum and statistical physics. The philosophical debates and distinctions are firmly grounded upon examples from actual physics, thus exemplifying a robustly empiricist approach. The essays, by both prominent scholars in the field and promising young researchers, constitute a pioneer effort in bringing out (...) the connections between probabilistic, causal and dispositional aspects of the quantum domain. The book will appeal to specialists in philosophy and foundations of physics, philosophy of science in general, metaphysics, ontology of physics theories, and philosophy of probability. (shrink)

This paper argues that if one considers just a single clinical moment there may be no principled way to choose among different approaches to psychoanalytic technique. One must in addition take into account what Aristotle called the final cause of psychoanalysis, which this paper argues is freedom. However, freedom is itself an open-ended concept with many aspects that need to be explored and developed from a psychoanalytic perspective. This paper considers one analytic moment from the perspectives of the techniques of (...) Paul Gray, Hans Loewald, the contemporary Kleinians and Jacques Lacan. It argues that, if we are to evaluate these techniques, we must take into account the different conceptions of freedom they are trying to facilitate. (shrink)

The notion of “responsibility gap” with artificial intelligence (AI) was originally introduced in the philosophical debate to indicate the concern that “learning automata” may make more difficult or impossible to attribute moral culpability to persons for untoward events. Building on literature in moral and legal philosophy, and ethics of technology, the paper proposes a broader and more comprehensive analysis of the responsibility gap. The responsibility gap, it is argued, is not one problem but a set of at least four (...) interconnected problems – gaps in culpability, moral and public accountability, active responsibility—caused by different sources, some technical, other organisational, legal, ethical, and societal. Responsibility gaps may also happen with non-learning systems. The paper clarifies which aspect of AI may cause which gap in which form of responsibility, and why each of these gaps matter. It proposes a critical review of partial and non-satisfactory attempts to address the responsibility gap: those which present it as a new and intractable problem (“fatalism”), those which dismiss it as a false problem (“deflationism”), and those which reduce it to only one of its dimensions or sources and/or present it as a problem that can be solved by simply introducing new technical and/or legal tools (“solutionism”). The paper also outlines a more comprehensive approach to address the responsibility gaps with AI in their entirety, based on the idea of designing socio-technical systems for “meaningful human control", that is systems aligned with the relevant human reasons and capacities. (shrink)

I present the text at Posterior Analytics II.11, 94b8-26, offer a tentative translation, discuss the main construals offered in the literature, and argue for my own interpretation. Some of the general questions I discuss are the following: 1. What is the nature of the explanatory syllogisms offered as examples, especially in the case of the moving and the final cause? Are they scientific demonstrative explanations? In the case of the final cause, are they practical syllogisms? Are they productive? 2. Are (...) we to read into such examples Aristotle’s requirements from APo I.4-6 that demonstrative premisses and conclusions are universal, per se, and necessary? If so, in what way? If such requirements do not apply here, what are the implications for question 1? 3. What, if any, is the advantage of one type of causal explanation over another in cases in which there is causal competition between complementary explanations? 4. What is the relation between the thesis of this chapter, especially the section dedicated to the final cause, and the argument of II.8-10? How is essence related to causes? How is explanation/demonstration-based definition related to causal explanation in terms of the four causes? (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)

Four-dimensionalism and eternalism are theories on time, change, and persistence. Christian philosophers and theologians have adopted four-dimensional eternalism for various reasons. In this paper I shall attempt to argue that four-dimensional eternalism conflicts with Christian thought. Section I will lay out two varieties of four-dimensionalism—perdurantism and stage theory—along with the typically associated ontologies of time of eternalism and growing block. I shall contrast this with presentism and endurantism. Section II will look at some of the purported (...) theological benefits of adopting four-dimensionalism and eternalism. Section III will examine arguments against four-dimensional eternalism from the problem of evil. Section IV will argue that four-dimensional eternalism causes problems for Christian eschatology. (shrink)

Over the past fifteen years there has been a considerable amount of debate concerning what theoretical population dynamic models tell us about the nature of natural selection and drift. On the causal interpretation, these models describe the causes of population change. On the statistical interpretation, the models of population dynamics models specify statistical parameters that explain, predict, and quantify changes in population structure, without identifying the causes of those changes. Selection and drift are part of a statistical description (...) of population change; they are not discrete, apportionable causes. Our objective here is to provide a definitive statement of the statistical position, so as to allay some confusions in the current literature. We outline four commitments that are central to statisticalism. They are: 1. Natural Selection is a higher order effect; 2. Trait fitness is primitive; 3. Modern Synthesis (MS)-models are substrate neutral; 4. MS-selection and drift are model-relative. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyze one of the highest achievements of humankind, the classical tragedy, via the application of the heuristic paradigm proposed by Aristotle in his Physics, the fourfold determination of the concept of cause. This scientific methodology – one of the most effective viatica for a comprehensive response to the question of the nature of an object – informs the inquiry into the universal nature of tragedy, its hypercomplexity and hence its ethical and human relevance. Firstly, the concept (...) of tragedy is dissected into its four causes – material, formal, efficient and final; given that the object of research is at the same time tragedy in general and this specific tragedy , each cause is subdivided in two, a distal one and a proximal one . Then, the methodology of the four causes is applied to the formal cause alone, the tragic conflict, in an attempt to better understand tragedy’s quiddity. The results of this more specific causal determination are finally applied to the four causes of tragedy, supporting the hypothesis of a close relationship between hybris, amartia, tragic conflict and education of the phronesis. (shrink)

Many philosophers are persuaded by familiar arguments that free will is incompatible with causal determinism. Yet, notoriously, past attempts to articulate how the right type of indeterminism might secure the capacity for autonomous action have generally been regarded as either demonstrably inadequate or irremediably obscure. This volume gathers together the most significant recent discussions concerning the prospects for devising a satisfactory indeterministic account of freedom of action. These essays give greater precision to traditional formulations of the problems associated with indeterministic (...) accounts and to the range of theoretical avenues for pursuing resolutions. The first four essays set out different challenges (from both compatibilists and those skeptical of the possibility of free will) to the adequacy of standard indeterministic theories. The next seven essays meet one or more of these challenges. Each of the fundamental types of approach--simple indeterminism, causal indeterminism, and agent causation--is represented in these novel and sophisticated proposals. The collection finishes with two essays that debate whether compatibilism entails that freedom of choice is a comparatively rare phenomenon within an individual's life. Eloquently presenting some of the most compelling and accessible arguments surrounding this central philosophical issue, Agents, Causes, and Events makes a valuable contribution to courses in free will/action theory and metaphysics. (shrink)

The theme of the specificity of medical causes in the Greco-Roman world is part of a wider research project on the notion of causality, the starting point of which is Aristotle and his seminal theorisation of the four causes. It therefore seemed useful to introduce this collection with a synthetic presentation of the Aristotelian conception of medicine, which is characterised by the knowledge of causes and represents a paradigm for the other arts and practical knowledge.

I argue that Aristotle’s account of scientific demonstrations in the Posterior Analytics is centred upon formal causation, understood as a demonstration in terms of essence (and as innocent of the distinction between form and matter). While Aristotle says that all four causes can be signified by the middle term in a demonstrative syllogism, and he discusses at some length efficient causation, much of Aristotle’s discussion is foremost concerned with the formal cause. Further, I show that Aristotle had very (...) detailed procedures for identifying the formal cause, and that he is aware of several problems which might lead one to erroneously identify the wrong form as the cause of a property. Finally, I show that Aristotle’s account can easily be adapted to material causation, and through some modifications (introduction of process universals related through parthood), hinted at in II 11-12 and 16-17, to efficient and final causation. (shrink)

Women are under-represented in surgery, especially in leadership and academic roles, and face a gender pay gap. There has been little work on the role of implicit biases in women’s under-representation in surgery. Nor has the impact of epistemic injustice, whereby stereotyping influences knowledge or credibility judgements, been explored. This article reports findings of a qualitative in-depth interview study with women surgeons that investigates gender biases in surgery, including subtle types of bias. The study was conducted with 46 women surgeons (...) and trainees of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. Maximum variance sampling strategies ensured a comprehensive set of perspectives. Data were analysed using iterative thematic analysis to document and classify forms of gender bias experienced by the participants, including implicit bias and epistemic injustice. It found four types of bias affecting women surgeons: workplace factors such as access to parental leave and role models; epistemic injustices—unfair assessments of women surgeons’ credibility by patients and colleagues; stereotyped expectations that they will carry out more of surgery’s carework, such as meeting the emotional needs of patients and objectification. Implicit biases arose in each category. Given that many of the biases identified in this study are small, are harmless on their own and are not necessarily under anyone’s conscious control, important questions arise regarding how they cause harm and how to address them. I draw on theoretical work on cumulative harm to answer these questions. (shrink)

Aristotle claimed there are four causes (and four corresponding types of explanation). The scientific revolution eliminated formal and final, leaving efficient and material. It is argued here that there is a role for formal causes in the sciences, especially in physics.

This is an expanded edition of Sydney Shoemaker's seminal collection of his work on interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Reproducing all of the original papers, many of which are now regarded as classics, and including four papers published since the first edition appeared in 1984, Identity, Cause, and Mind's reappearance will be warmly welcomed by philosophers and students alike.

The causal theory of action is widely recognized in the literature of the philosophy of action as the "standard story" of human action and agency -- the nearest approximation in the field to a theoretical orthodoxy. This volume brings together leading figures working in action theory today to discuss issues relating to the CTA and its applications, which range from experimental philosophy to moral psychology. Some of the contributors defend the theory while others criticize it; some draw from historical sources (...) while others focus on recent developments; some rely on the tools of analytic philosophy while others cite the latest empirical research on human action. All agree, however, on the centrality of the CTA in the philosophy of action. The contributors first consider metaphysical issues, then reasons-explanations of action, and, finally, new directions for thinking about the CTA. They discuss such topics as the tenability of some alternatives to the CTA; basic causal deviance; the etiology of action ; teleologism and anticausalism; and the compatibility of the CTA with theories of embodied cognition. Two contributors engage in an exchange of views on intentional omissions that stretches over four essays, directly responding to each other in their follow-up essays. As the action -oriented perspective becomes more influential in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, this volume offers a long-needed debate over foundational issues. Contributors: Fred Adams, Jesús H. Aguilar, John Bishop, Andrei A. Buckareff, Randolph Clarke, Jennifer Hornsby, Alicia Juarrero, Alfred R. Mele, Michael S. Moore, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Josef Perner, Johannes Roessler, David-Hillel Ruben, Carolina Sartorio, Michael Smith, Rowland Stout The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

Aristotle presents four causes in Posterior Analytics 2.11, but where we expect matter we find instead the confusing formula, ‘what things being the case, necessarily this is the case’, and an equally confusing example. Some commentators infer that Aristotle is not referring to matter, others that he is but in a non-standard way. I argue that APo. 94a20-34 presents not matter, but determination by general features or facts, including facts about something’s genus. The closest connection to matter is (...) Aristotle’s view that the relation between genus and species is analogous to that between matter and a hylomorphic compound. (shrink)

This article attempts an organological and pharmacological re-interpretation of the later Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology as a provocative mode of revealing of beings, in particular of its central notions of Gestell [enframing] Gefahr [danger], Kehre [turning] and Ereignis [event]. Although these notions in principle allow us to think what is at stake currently in the Anthropocene as the age of total automation, generalized toxicity of the technical milieu and post-truth calling for a radical bifurcation, they need to be reframed (...) and re-imagined in terms of the process of exosomatization issuing from humanity’s original and necessary default of origin and situated within the perspective of entropy and negentropy, both unthought by Heidegger. Only thus will it become possible to really think and take care of what Heidegger called the danger of technology and its turning into the event as the destiny of enframing. This also requires a rethinking of Aristotle’s theory of four causes as it is invoked by Heidegger in his analysis of technology, in particular the efficient and final causes, in terms of what Deleuze called quasi-causality, here understood as the need and the obligation for mortals to make their fault come true, i.e., to make it truly happen or make it advene in truth, out of the experience of the danger as the ordeal of the necessary default. Thus becoming the anti-anthropic cause of anthropic toxicity, humans would restore final causality as quasi-causality and inaugurate, as neganthropos, the bifurcation into the Neganthropocene. (shrink)

In this reply, I seek to summarize fairly the criticisms advanced by each of my four critics, Jonathan Schaffer, Gideon Yaffe, John Gardner, and Carolina Sartorio. That there is so little overlap either in the aspects of the book on which they focus or in the arguments they advance about those issues has forced me to reply to each of them separately. Schaffer focuses much of his criticisms on my view that absences cannot serve as causal relata and argues (...) that this commits me to the view that double preventions cannot be causal of events such as deaths. I deny that double preventions such as beheadings are not causal, while admitting that other double preventions are not causal but denying that this latter conclusion is unwelcome in its implications. Yaffe criticizes my view that a person substantially causing some harm H is sufficient for that person having performed the activity of H-ing, whereas I affirm that causing H is sufficient for doing the action of H-ing even if it is not sufficient for intentionally H-ing. Gardner takes issue with my “experiential argument” for the relevance of causation to moral blame; he urges that we cannot infer that we are more guilty from either the psychological fact that we feel more guilty or from the moral fact that it is virtuous to feel such heightened guilt, because it is viciously circular: we feel such guilt only because we have already judged that we are more guilty, and it is virtuous to feel such guilt only because we in fact are more guilty. I deny such circularity exists. Sartorio takes issue with my thesis that in omissive overdetermination cases neither omitter is morally responsible for the harm. I trade intuitions with Sartorio about a range of related cases that we each think bears on the issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Four-Dimensionalism and Identity Across Time: Henry of Ghent vs. BonaventureRichard CrossModern accounts of the identity of an object across time tend to fall roughly into two basic types.Let us say that something persists ıff, somehow or other, it exists at various times; this is the neutral word. Something perdures iff it persists by having different temporal parts, or stages, at different times, though no one part of it (...) is wholly present at more than one time; whereas it endures iff it persists by being wholly present at more than one time.1On the first of these analyses, but not the second, a persistent object includes temporal parts, and persistent material substances are thus on this analysis four-dimensional objects. On the first analysis, but not on the second, time-indices are explicable in terms of temporal parts. I shall take this as the basic difference between the two views.2Both views allow us to talk of temporal order and temporal direction. I [End Page 393] shall follow the medievals and talk about succession to capture both of these claims: “The notion of succession formally consists in the notion of ‘before’ and ‘after,’”3 and I take it that talk of “before” and “after” entails both order and direction.4 Medieval accounts of identity across time are, however, in some ways more obscure than the two modern ones just described. The medievals tend to associate all temporal succession with temporal extension: an object x has temporal succession if and only if x is temporally extended (and thus includes temporal parts).5 The medievals also (correctly, I believe) tend to suppose that substances—unlike (say) processes—do not have temporal parts.6 Thus, by the end of the thirteenth century the schoolmen commonly [End Page 394] distinguish permanent objects from successive objects. Permanent objects do not, and successive objects do, have temporal parts.7 Successive objects are processes; the class of permanent objects was generally held to include not only God, but also angels, material substances, and static accidents (i.e., accidents which do not entail any sort of process).8Given these claims, there is a problem to be faced in giving an account of the identity of, say, a material substance across time. But it is not the problem we would face. Our problem, post-Hume, is to explain the relevant (explanatory) continuity requirements for identity across time. The medievals’ problem is rather different. They do not need to specify general continuity requirements, because for them there is a very real sense in which substances—and indeed all permanent objects—lack temporal extension and, therefore, any sort of temporal succession at all. The problem for the medievals is thus to explain how substances can persist at all, rather than exist merely fleetingly.9In what follows, I will examine two thirteenth-century solutions to this problem. The first is a radical one: simply to deny the standard claim that substances lack temporal parts. This view will thus bear some resemblance to what we would label four-dimensionalism. The second solution I will examine represents one of the more successful attempts to defend the standard thirteenth-century line that substances lack temporal parts. This solution goes some way towards allowing succession (and time-indexing) without appealing to temporal parts.To understand the debate, we need to keep in mind that the medievals—following Aristotle—talk of the temporality of an object in terms of its being [End Page 395] measured by time. Confusingly, they might speak of a substance’s being measured in one sort of way, and its accidental properties’ being measured in another. Thus, by the end of the thirteenth century it was often claimed that the duration of a substance is measured not by time but by the aevum—the durational measure of objects lacking temporal parts—while some of a substance’s accidental properties could be measured by time. (I will explain in detail below how time and the aevum were understood.) On this view, the temporality of an object’s properties is not sufficient cause for positing the temporality of the object. There are acceptable and unacceptable ways of understanding... (shrink)

Clinical primary prevention eliminates or preempts either a susceptibility or risk (synergistically a cause) in order to avoid a specific harm. Philosophically, primary prevention gets caught in the metaphysical controversy of the “hard questions” of whether it is possible to “cause not” both through a positive action (preventive act causes no harm) or no action (avoiding something causes no harm). I examine my previously proposed four-step definition of the process of prevention, discuss its limitations in light of (...) the “hard questions,” and then offer a revised five-step process definition that eliminates the “cause not” concerns by changing the goal of prevention from avoiding harm, a negative state, to achieving optimal health, a positive state. (shrink)

Philosophy , October 1974, contains an article entitled ‘Aristotle's Four Becauses’, by Professor Max Hocutt, who contends that Aristotle's aitia means ‘a because’ or ‘an explanation’ rather than ‘a cause’ and should be translated accordingly. He argues that only Aristotle's efficient ‘cause’ is a cause in the English sense of the word, and that ‘Aristotle's theory of “causes” is simply an application of his theory of syllogistic to the analysis of scientific knowledge’ . Both contentions deserve a word.

This chapter explains how the rise of the Mechanical philosophy during the seventeenth century contributed to the transformation of the traditional, Aristotelian schema of four causes into the dominance of efficient causation as the paradigmatic cause by the time of David Hume. But the chapter simultaneously shows that the mechanical philosophy also gave rise to a number of problems internal to it, as diagnosed by Newton and Newtonian natural philosophers, that facilitated more careful analysis of the nature of (...) causation. (shrink)

Richard Connell’s book brings together Aristotle’s great metaphysical insight, that everything has four causes, with the discoveries of modern natural science. Whereas many contemporary philosophers and natural scientists think the question of the nature and number of causes is irrelevant or resolved, Connell thinks that they are indispensable distinctions that have been mauled beyond recognition.

Cet article défend l’idée que l’on peut distinguer quatre niveaux d’analyse au sein des sciences sociales (y compris l’économie) – à savoir, a) un niveau descriptif statistique, b) un niveau explicatif causal, c) un niveau explicatif téléologique, et d) un niveau téléologique prescriptif. Généralement, les sciences sociales ne considèrent que les niveaux a) et b). L’exclusion du niveau c) peut conduire à considérer comme des « anomalies » certains comportements qui ne sont pas compatibles avec des théories comme celle du (...) choix rationnel ou celle de l’utilité espérée – à savoir, des théories qui adoptent une attitude dite de « rationalité instrumentale ». Inclure le niveau c) dans la réflexion implique de considérer la « rationalité pratique » et cela rend ces anomalies « raisonnables ». L’article prend pour cadre théorique la notion de causalité et la téléologie d’Aristote. La première section introduit ces notions, tandis que la deuxième section explore les points de vue contemporains sur la causalité et la téléologie. La troisième section introduit des arguments pour établir la légitimité de l’usage des valeurs en sciences sociales. Cette étape est nécessaire, car les causes finales des explications téléologiques dans le domaine des choses humaines sont bien, en définitive, des valeurs. Ces discussions ouvrent la voie à l’introduction, dans la quatrième et dernière section, des quatre niveaux analytiques susmentionnés. Plus précisément, dans le cas de l’économie, cette discussion se fonde sur la classification des disciplines économiques chez Carl Menger. (shrink)

Thomas Twiss has written a careful, well-documented study of the evolution of Trotsky’s ideas on theUSSRbureaucracy until 1936. He also traces Trotsky’s assessments of the causes and meaning of the Moscow Trials and the Terror in 1936–8; but essentially the detailed study stops in 1936. In fact, Trotsky’s thinking continued to develop in response to new developments after 1936. The puzzle which Trotsky grappled with – the ‘workers’ state’ which is simultaneously the instrument of fascistic terror against the workers (...) by ‘the sole privileged and commanding stratum’ – was connected to puzzles in the more general Marxist theory of the state, which Twiss explores usefully in his opening chapter. (shrink)