Causality and Causal Explanation in Aristotle by Nathanael Stein;

Author:Nathanael Stein;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Thus, this passage also affirms a difference among end-directed efficient causes between those whose actualities are ends-in-themselves, exemplified most of all by the activities characteristic of substance, and those whose actualities are not—that is, between the efficient causes for activity profiles and transeunt change profiles.

Likewise, Aristotle is at pains in Met. IX 1–6 to draw a distinction between the senses of potentiality and actuality related to change and those corresponding to activities like seeing and thinking, using the more familiar notion of a transeunt power to bring about change as a means of approaching the target notion—actuality (energeia)—indirectly. His way of proceeding shows that he recognizes clearly that the distinction is not obvious and constitutes a philosophical development that his audience will not take as trivial.31

Thus, differences in causal profile tend to coincide with distinctions Aristotle draws in the corpus which do not merely amount to differences of kind, but need marking in stronger ways, often requiring a good amount of philosophical work to discern. So even though Aristotle does not describe the notion of a causal profile as I have developed it here, it is reasonable to take it as capturing some of his key claims and commitments about causality.

One might raise a worry at this stage whether Aristotle’s four primary causal roles are therefore too metaphysically heterogeneous to be informative or constitute “natural joints.” If the relationships included under “matter” turn out to involve genuinely different types of relationship, what are the grounds for thinking that they have anything important in common? And if they do, why not think that this common feature is the relevant causal property, rather than whatever differentiates them? Similar worries are and have been raised about Aristotle’s approach to other concepts like soul, his critiques of Platonic notions like the Good—and indeed cause in general. His position on such matters is a philosophically complicated one: he must maintain that, for example, the different types of material causation relate to genuinely different types and/or senses of potentiality, but nonetheless ought to be understood as forming a coherent grouping, not merely analogous to one another. Rather, they are organized roughly in terms of their being different ways in which something’s abilities to bear various determinate features and exhibit different behaviors are grounded in its other persistent features. The role itself has content, he must say, though we do not fully grasp it except by way of its distinctive types of occupant. The worry is therefore relevant for Aristotle’s general approach to philosophical matters; I will return to it later (§§ 7.5 and 8.7).

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