natmain wrote:

Does this mean that Thomists don't think that all cause and effect events happen at the same time, rather that there are two types of cause and effect events: one that happens chronologically and one that happens simultaneously?

Every cause and its effect happens simultaneously. In per accidens series, however, time passes between each distinct effect (but not between any individual cause in the series and that cause's effect). In per se series, even the distinct effects occur simultaneously.

​The reason I brought it up is just that, whatever the case is with bricks and windows or most of the rest of the discussion on page twenty-one, the type of causal series Aquinas discusses in his proofs, per se causal series, don't leave room for causes and effects in them to be other than simultaneous, anyway.

Last edited by John West (7/31/2015 1:02 pm)

natmain wrote:

By simultaneously do we then mean that both cause and effect are the same event* rather than happening at the same moment in time?

In a single cause-effect pair, yes, the action of the cause is the same event as the occurrence of the effect. In a causal series, though, the situation is a bit more complicated.

The kind of causal series Aquinas discusses in his first two Ways (especially the Second) is a series in which each element after the first acts as an "instrument" of the preceding cause. The stock illustration** is that of a hand that pushes a stick that in turn pushes a stone. In this kind of causal series, called a per se causal series, the entire series is really just passing along the causality of its first member; the stick has no power of its own to move the stone but merely passes along the causal power of the hand, and when the hand stops pushing, so does the stick. (This is in contrast to a per accidens series, in which each element exercises its own causal power rather than just passing along the causal power of the element before it. The stock illustration here is that of a father siring a son who then goes on to sire his own son in turn. The son's becoming a father isn't a mere passing along of the original father's own reproductive powers; the original father may even be dead at the time.)

Now, the hand's pushing the stick is just the same thing as the stick's being pushed by the hand, and the stick's pushing the stone is just the same thing as the stone's being pushed by the stick. In a sense, the hand's pushing the stone is also the same thing as the stone's being pushed by the hand. But in this case there's an intermediate step in the movement of the stick, and we can break out the causal process into two parts. Those two parts aren't simply identical to one another; they're distinguishable events, and yes, they happen at the same moment in time (though not necessarily at the same "instant," but explaining why not would take us a bit far afield here).

So it would be best to say that the action of every cause and the occurrence of its immediate effect are the same event. The cause's more remote effects, however, may be distinguishable events even though (as when they're part of an instrumental or per se causal series) they occur at the same time.

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* I rephrase this a bit in what follows because causes are things, not events.

** I say "illustration" rather than "example" because its point is just to get the idea across. Don't get too hung up on the physical details; it doesn't matter whether the hand-stick-stone series is an actual example or not.

Last edited by Scott (7/31/2015 6:14 pm)

natmain wrote:

In this case the cause and effect are happening simultaneously.  Am I correct in saying this? 

Yes, I think that's right. And the main thing to remember in general is that, on the Aristotelian-Thomist view, all causal sequences (instrumental or otherwise) can be broken down into bits like this, in which the action of a cause and the occurrence of its effect are "simultaneous" because they're the same event considered from two different points of view.

In the brick/window example, the throwing of the brick is a prior event that imparted motion to the brick, and it was caused by the person who threw it (or various specific parts of that person). The brick's hitting the window is the event that actually breaks the window, and the cause of that effect is the brick (or the parts of it that hit the parts of the window), which imparts its motion to the glass in an event that just is the breaking of the window. These events constitute a single causal sequence (person breaks window with brick), but that sequence can be broken up into (in this instance) non-simultaneous parts (lots of them, if we break it down to the molecular level).

Last edited by Scott (8/02/2015 7:49 pm)