Suárez's metaphysics of efficient causation

Jacob Tuttle, Purdue University

Abstract

My dissertation articulates and defends an interpretation of Francisco Suárez's metaphysics of efficient causation. The dissertation is divided into four chapters. In Chapter 1, I explore how Suárez understands efficient-causal situations (ECSs)—i.e., situations (or facts, or states of affairs) that account for the truth of statements of the form 'C efficiently causes E'. According to Suárez, efficient causes produce their effects by acting, where action is to be understood as the exercise of a causal power. I show that he analyzes ECSs in terms of five components: a cause, an effect, an action, a causal power, and a time. Among these, action plays the most important role, because Suárez takes it to be the causation or 'causality' (causalitas) of an efficient cause—i.e., that in virtue of which something qualifies as an efficient cause. My discussion of ECSs in the first chapter remains largely neutral on questions about the nature and ontological status of the components of these situations. Subsequent chapters aim to address such questions, while paying special attention to the metaphysics of action and causal powers. Because of the central role of action in ECSs, Chapters 2 and 3 both focus on issues associated with the nature of action. In Chapter 2, I examine action's relationship to the other Aristotelian categories, and in particular whether Suárez thinks action is reducible to any of these categories. After clarifying the dialectical options, I show that he takes action (and thus efficient causation) to be an irreducible or sui generis feature of reality, and moreover that his theological commitments require that he adopt this position. Action turns out to be a special sort of property—what Suárez calls a 'mode' (modus)—of an effect. My discussion of action in Chapter 2 focuses on clarifying Suárez's views about the nature of action it as such. Accordingly, the main conclusions of that chapter apply equally well to every action and ECS. However, it turns out that some of the most interesting and difficult questions associated with Suárez's theory of efficient causation concern the particular types of action he acknowledges. In Chapter 3, I clarify how Suárez understands one of the most fundamental distinctions he employs in his treatment of efficient causation—namely, that between motion (motus) or change (mutatio), on the one hand, and creation ex nihilo, on the other. I argue that this distinction is significant for understanding his views not only about motion and creation, but also about the nature and ontological status of action more generally. In Chapter 4, I examine a component of ECSs that has so far remained in the background—namely, causal powers. In earlier chapters, I argue that Suárez understands a causal power as an ability or capacity that a thing has to perform a certain kind of action, and thereby to produce a certain kind of effect. In Chapter 4, I identify which items in Suárez's ontology play the role of an active power. I also show how his views about the nature and ontological status of powers motivate his position in an important Scholastic controversy about the roles of substantial and accidental forms in the generation of substances. The most important primary source for my dissertation is Suárez's Metaphysical Disputations. Several of the individual disputations that I examine have never been translated into English. As an aid to the recovery of these texts, and to facilitate further Suárez scholarship, I include in my dissertation three appendices with original translations of material from each of the following: it On the Causes of Being in General (Disputation 12), it On Action (Disputation 48), and On Passion (Disputation 49).

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Brower, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Philosophy

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