Descartes on God, Creation, and Conservation
2011; Philosophy Education Society Inc.; Volume: 64; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2154-1302
Autores Tópico(s)Evolution and Science Education
ResumoFUNDAMENTAL TO SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY, thus in historical context of Descartes, is question of how causation is divided or shared between God and creatures. Tad Schmaltz's Descartes on Causation provides an extensive account of Descartes's answer to this question, specifically, what is the precise nature of creaturely contribution to causality in nature? (1) The moderate and consensus position among scholastics is that, while Goal is universal and primary cause of being and change in universe, natures of created things provide a realm of secondary causes--Aristotelian forms, for example--open to study by unaided reason. Natural substances are ultimately instruments of divine providence (Aquinas) and are able to possess their own causal efficacy only as subject to divine concursus (Suarez), but they are genuine efficient causes of change in another. (2) A less moderate, potentially theologically radical position is occasionalism, originally Islamic but most notably proclaimed in early modern period by Christian Cartesian, Malebranche: [N]atural causes are not true causes; they are only occasional causes that act only through [immediate] force and efficacy of will of (3) As Dan Garber describes it in reference to world of bodies, occasionalism is doctrine that: changes that one body appears to cause in another upon impact, changes that a body can cause in a mind in producing a sensation or a mind can cause in a body in producing a voluntary action, are all due directly to God, moving bodies or producing sensations in minds on occasion of other appropriate events. (4) Was Descartes an occasionalist in one or more of these three senses (namely, body-to-body, body-to-mind, mind-to-body)? The controversy continues. For Garber, Descartes is an occasionalist at level of inanimate bodies: [I]t seems to me as clear as anything that, for Descartes, God is only cause in inanimate world of bodies, that bodies cannot themselves be genuine causes of change in physical world of extended substance. (5) I confess I find occasionalism hard to believe. Volitional motion aside (and Garber's Descartes is not a mind-to-body occasionalist), think of a game of billiards or, for that matter, a football game (focus on what players' bodies undergo). To require God to cause immediately all changes of speed and direction of colliding billiard balls and football players would make of God an intrusive busybody (metaphorically speaking) of colossal proportions. Given Descartes's great interest in mathematical physics and human autonomy, (6) I find it even harder to take him in particular as an occasionalist. For anyone interested in Descartes, but especially for those who share my doubts, Descartes on Causation is an essential work. Schmaltz mounts an argument at opposite end of interpretive spectrum, namely, for causal realism in Descartes's physics and causally restricted mere conservationism (as opposed to occasionalism and concurentism) on part of Descartes's God. (7) Analysis of Descartes's imprecise account of force leads Schmaltz to propose that: for Descartes bodies in motion that God continuously conserves have as modes of their duration various forces that determine outcomes of collisions ... These forces and inclinations are therefore true causes ... that produce particular changes due to contact among bodies. (8) Seminal for this conclusion is Gueroult's claim that, for Descartes, force, duration, and existence are one and same [extramathematical] thing (conatus) under three different aspects. (9) Causation in physics, however, is subject of only one chapter (the third) in rive, in addition to introduction and conclusion of Descartes on Causation. Let me back up and attempt to give a broader view of an unusually broad-ranging book. …
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