Abstract

Philosophers widely maintain that a cause is a sufficient condition for, or necessitates, its effect, and that Aristotle agrees. I argue against both this notion, and the interpretation of Aristotle that suggests that he endorses it. ;For Aristotle, "out of necessity" does not mean "necessitated," but "from something that cannot be otherwise," that is, "due to a constitutive feature of some nature." The idea here is that the nature of the cause brings about, and so explains, the effect. Building upon this notion and drawing on the work of Anscombe and Russell, I critique the contemporary notion of a cause. I suggest that this notion conflates two distinct senses of necessity: the necessity of a cause's "nature," and the necessity of something being "forced" to happen a certain way. On Aristotle's view, there can be "causal slack" between causes and effects: causes do not as such "determine" the time, place and manner in which effects come about. ;Aristotle's discussion of heavenly movers shows that "predetermination," even in Aristotle's sense, requires a nature of a very special kind, whose nature it is to bring about certain effects in the future. Thus "predetermination" cannot occur in the sublunary world. ;Aristotle's implicit rejection of a notion of causal necessitation explains why he lacks a problem of biological reduction. Aristotle's key problem in biological explanation is not blocking reductionism, but explaining how animals can possibly be generated, given the causal slack between material and efficient causes and their effects. Aristotle therefore posits a second kind of cause, the formal nature: a structured organic system which takes up causal slack and unifies material constituents into a living thing. ;On Aristotle's view, voluntary action and human choice straightforwardly "cause" human actions. One might object that "the mind" cannot possibly causally influence "the body" in this way, but this assumes that "the physical" gives a "sufficient causal explanation" for all "physical" effects. Because Aristotle rejects this assumption, he has a quite different account of soul-body interaction similar to, but in several respects more well-developed than, a certain form of contemporary emergentism