iwpoe wrote:

This is why I'm inclined to call God's creation a unique causal power.

iwpoe,

I think you would find plenty of sympathy in Aristotle and Aquinas about the radical uniqueness of creation because creation isn't a change; whereas, the four kinds of causes we employ presuppose creation and describe and explain change. Hence an argument to God's necessity could be made both in the Physics and in the Metaphysics because the reality of change (Physics) can't be accounted for in terms of a change as this leads into an infinite regress.

Timocrates wrote:

I think you would find plenty of sympathy in Aristotle and Aquinas about the radical uniqueness of creation because creation isn't a change; whereas, the four kinds of causes we employ presuppose creation and describe and explain change.

Creatio ex nihilo is unique, but Aquinas and neo-Thomists (Ed, anyway) still consider it an act of efficient causation. (See #7).

We should be clear: the four (six) causes haven't been standard either, and the mishmash that is the post Humian view of 'cause' isn't properly an efficient cause either (because it often collapses the distinction between efficient and material and probably sometimes formal if we really dissected different views and what they entail).

iwpoe wrote:

Actually, now that I think about it, Hume's own version of causation would most resemble a psychologized final causation, since presumably the association of perceptions is not arbitrary, and follows upon how the mind is directed in associating them.

Though, I'm not even sure it's right to say that Hume's version is a psychologized anything, since he provides no grounds to speak of a non perceptual world.

I think that's an interesting observation, iwpoe, about Hume's account. He seems to be assuming something in his own examples that might be thought to beg the question against the conclusion he draws:

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy wrote:

Hume shows that experience does not tell us much. Of two events, A and B, we say that A causes B when the two always occur together, that is, are constantly conjoined. Whenever we find A, we also find B, and we have a certainty that this conjunction will continue to happen. Once we realize that “A must bring about B” is tantamount merely to “Due to their constant conjunction, we are psychologically certain that B will follow A”, then we are left with a very weak notion of necessity.

- David Hume: Causality

What made us associate the two events in the first place? Why do we not rather think B therefore A (and we sometimes might, if B is thought to be an effect presupposing certain, necessary cause)? I mean I am not the first to point out already that Hume here temporally separates the cause and its effect, which just compounds the issue, but why even associate event 1 with event 2, say? Again, even if we exaggerate the certainty that cause/event A is or will be the cause of event/effect B, what grounds did we have for thinking that B didn't instead cause A? I mean on Hume's account there's no reason why we shouldn't. Perhaps he just didn't see this consequence or maybe suppressed investigating it out of awkwardness and difficulty?

Last edited by Timocrates (2/28/2016 7:40 pm)

Also, I've never been asked to give a full account of all the causes as faithful to the Greek view as I can, so I'm looking some things over and I shot an email to Lloyd Gerson for a little extra help. I don't want to give a poor account of "material cause" if I can avoid it, since I understand the distinction but not as sharply as I would like. The Platono-Aristotelian view of causation is so completly different from the usual ways of talking about cause today, that I'm going to have to get it very clear what's going on, since even I'm inclined to say things about especially efficient causation that aren't quite right or at least too quickly occlude the origional way of putting things.