Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Volume 54 by Victor Caston;

Author:Victor Caston; [Caston, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192558756
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2018-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

Causality and Coextensiveness in Aristotle’S Posterior Analytics 1. 13

Lucas Angioni

1. Introduction

In this paper I discuss an important feature of the notion of cause in Post. An. 1. 13, 78b 13–28. Some scholars have taken the passage as introducing a false principle about explanation1 (or even a fallacy of conversion2). I claim that Aristotle is introducing a logical requirement for being the strictly appropriate cause in a scientific demonstration, namely: an appropriate cause must be coextensive with what it appropriately explains. Some interpretations tend in this direction, but do not account for the intricacies of the text and, furthermore, do not explain how Aristotle goes beyond negative causes expressed in the second‐figure syllogisms. My interpretation provides a careful and full discussion of the intricate steps by which Aristotle presents the requirement. Furthermore, I argue that the requirement is completely consistent with an important feature of Aristotle’s notion of scientific explanation, namely, his insistence on katholou predications as understood in Post. An. 1. 4, 73b26–74a3.

The underlying subject of this paper is the notion of cause understood as one of the key notions involved in Aristotle’s conception of scientific knowledge in the Posterior Analytics. For ease of reference, I shall use the expression ‘primary cause’ to refer to it. I shall not examine here Aristotle’s general view on causes, or how it differs from other conceptions, such as the Humean one.3 As for what ‘cause’ signifies for him, I shall assume that a cause for Aristotle is a real‐world item (a substance’s attribute, or a state of affairs, or a thing’s essence, or an event, etc.) that grounds another real‐world item—that makes it what it is. Perhaps ‘ground’ would be better than ‘cause’ as a translation of aition, but for simplicity’s sake I shall retain the word ‘cause’.4

The notion of causality in Aristotle’s theory of demonstration is cast within the triadic framework of syllogisms: a cause is expressed as a middle term (B) which explains why a given attribute (A) is present in a given subject (C).5 Aristotle’s talk about causes can be very misleading, for sometimes (as in Physics 2.3 or Metaphysics Δ 2) he does not make explicit the triadic structure of causal relations and, more importantly for the purposes of this paper, he seems to give different criteria for sorting out what counts as a relevant explanandum: sometimes the explanandum is explicitly introduced as the relation between a subject and a predicate, but sometimes Aristotle seems to take the predicate as the explanandum.6 I cannot address this complicated question here. But, as it is important for my purposes to focus on the logical relations between the B‐term and the A‐term as attributes of a given subject, I shall prefer to take A as the ‘effect’7 or that of which the cause is cause.

I cannot go into details about Aristotle’s notion of scientific demonstration, including whether it has an axiomatic model, or how we should understand the role of necessity, principles, and per se predications, except to the extent that they figure in my interpretation of the passage that constitutes my main focus.

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