The article investigates the distinction between the physical and the intentional causality that appeared in the 17thcentury scholasticism in the course of polemics with the traditional Aristotelian classification of causes and with the conception of causality developed by Francisco Suárez. The introduction of the distinction between physical and intentional causation was motivated by the insufficiency of the notion of causality, adopted in ancient and medieval natural philosophy to describe the causal processes in the sphere of conscious human activity. The authors (...) of the 17thcentury took as a base two concepts carefully elaborated by Suárez, that is, the concepts of influxus and of metaphorica motio, and, starting from them, introduced an additional concept of influxus intentionalis. (shrink)

This paper critiques a narrative concerning causality in later scholasticism due to, among others, Des Chene, Carraud, Schmaltz, Schmid, and Pasnau. On this account, internal developments in the scholastic tradition culminating in Suárez lead to the efficient cause being regarded as the paradigmatic kind of cause, anticipating a view explicitly held by the Cartesians. Focusing on Suárez and his scholastic reception, I defend the following claims: a) Suárez’s definition of cause does not privilege efficient causation; b) Suárez’s readers, from Timpler (...) to Arriaga, did not interpret him as privileging efficient causation; c) it is only much later, in Clauberg, that we find a narrowing of the meaning of causation to efficient causal action; but d) this shift is better explained by Clauberg’s rejection of substance hylomorphism in favor of Descartes’s doctrine of substance, rather than by any troubles within the Aristotelian causal framework. (shrink)