Divine Activity and Motive Power in Descartes's Physics

This paper is the second of a two-part reexamination of causation in Descartes's physics. Some prominent contemporary scholars, including Gary Hatfield and Daniel Garber, have argued that Descartes is an Occasionalist about natural motion. On their reading, Descartes holds that God alone causes the motions that are not caused by the free actions of finite minds. Hatfield and Garber offer similar, but independent arguments that Descartes's views about physics – in particular, his arguments that the laws of nature are grounded in God's immutability – entail Occasionalism about natural motion. In this paper I argue contra Hatfield and Garber that Descartes's natural philosophy does not entail Occasionalism. Descartes holds that God is a direct efficient cause of every natural motion. Yet he does not take this to imply that bodies lack genuine causal powers. According to Descartes, God concurs with bodies to cause natural motion in such a way that both God and bodies are genuine, efficient causes of motion. I conclude by presenting an account of how Descartes's theory of body is compatible with the thesis that bodies have intrinsic active causal powers.     

Spinoza on the Essences of Modes

This paper examines some aspects of Spinoza's metaphysics of the essences of modes.2 ²I would like to thank John Carriero, Calvin Normore, Eliot Michaelson, Eileen Nutting, Paul Nichols, Alexi Patsaouras, Rachel Johnson and Sarah Jansen for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this paper. I situate Spinoza's use of the notion of essence as a response to traditional, Aristotelian, ways of thinking about essence. I argue that, although Spinoza rejects part of the Aristotelian conception of essence, according to which it is in virtue of its essence that a thing is a member of a kind, he nevertheless retains a different part of such a conception, according to which an essence is some structural feature of a thing which causally explains other, non-essential features. I go on to develop an account of Spinoza's metaphysics of essence, according to which essences, what he sometimes calls formal essences, are produced by the divine essence prior to and independent of the creation of finite modes, and according to which essences are the formal or exemplar causes of finite modes. I then argue that finite modes, in virtue of the formal essences which they actualize, are genuine causal relata. Finally, I offer some speculations about Spinoza's answer to the question, ‘Why, in a necessitarian cosmos filled with formal essences, should there be temporal finite modes at all?’     

Negative life events and symptoms of depression and anxiety: stress causation and/or stress generation

Background and Objectives: Stressful life events are known to contribute to development of depression; however, it is possible this link is bidirectional. The present study examined whether such stress generation effects are greater than the effects of stressful life events on depression, and whether stress generation is also evident with anxiety. Design: Participants were two large age cohorts (N = 732 aged 44 years; N = 705 aged 63 years) from the West of Scotland Twenty-07 study. Methods: Stressful life events, depression, and anxiety symptoms were measured twice five years apart. Cross-lagged panel analysis examined the mutual influences of stressful life events on depression and on anxiety over time. Results: Life events predicted later depressive symptomatology (p = .01), but the depression predicting life events relationship was less strong (p = .06), whereas earlier anxiety predicted life events five years later (p = .001). There was evidence of sex differences in the extent to which life events predicted later anxiety. Conclusions: This study provides evidence of stress causation for depression and weaker evidence for stress generation. In contrast, there was strong evidence of stress generation for anxiety but weaker evidence for stress causation, and that differed for men and women.     

Mental causation as multiple causation

The paper argues that mental causation can be explained from the sufficiency of counterfactual dependence for causation together with relatively weak assumptions about the metaphysics of mind. If a physical event counterfactually depends on an earlier physical event, it also counterfactually depends on, and hence is caused by, a mental event that correlates with (or supervenes on) this earlier physical event, provided that this correlation (or supervenience) is sufficiently modally robust. This account of mental causation is consistent with the overdetermination of physical events by mental events and other physical events, but does not entail it.

The Emergence and Irreducibility of Scientific Knowledge： A Multi-Synergic-Holism

The world possesses a hierarchical structure and evolves through emergence. Its levels are the result of emergence, and possess unique properties and functions which their components and emergent bases do not. Each of these levels also possesses basic laws or rules which cannot be logically deduced from other levels, and evince downward causation. Therefore, there are non-linear causal networks among the levels of complex systems in which causal reductionism does not hold. The hierarchical structure is formed in accordance with the increasing organized complexity of the objects, so that different levels give birth to different disciplines, and different disciplines have their own theoretical autonomy and independence. Therefore, theories across different levels are essentially irreducible, and any apparent case of reduction may only be so in the sense of a partial reduction. Emergence-evolution-hierarchy ontology and multi-synergic holism is compatible with reductionism even as it transcends it.     

Cause by Omission and Norm: Not Watering Plants

People generally accept that there is causation by omission—that the omission of some events cause some related events. But this acceptance elicits the selection problem, or the difficulty of explaining the selection of a particular omissive cause or class of causes from the causal conditions. Some theorists contend that dependence theories of causation cannot resolve this problem. In this paper, we argue that the appeal to norms adequately resolves the selection problem for dependence theories, and we provide novel experimental evidence for it.     

Dynamical Systems Theory as an Approach to Mental Causation

Summary  Dynamical systems theory (DST) is gaining popularity in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Recently several authors (e.g. J.A.S. Kelso, 1995; A. Juarrero, 1999; F. Varela and E. Thompson, 2001) offered a DST approach to mental causation as an alternative for models of mental causation in the line of Jaegwon Kim (e.g. 1998). They claim that some dynamical systems exhibit a form of global to local determination or downward causation in that the large-scale, global activity of the system governs or constrains local interactions. This form of downward causation is the key to the DST model of mental causation. In this paper I evaluate the DST approach to mental causation. I will argue that the main problem for current DST approaches to mental causation is that they lack a clear metaphysics. I propose one metaphysical framework (Gillett, 2002a/b/c) that might deal with this deficiency.     

The Causal Structure of Evolutionary Theory

One contentious debate in the philosophy of biology is that between the statisticalists and causalists. The former understand core evolutionary concepts like fitness and selection to be mere statistical summaries of underlying causal processes. In this view, evolutionary changes cannot be causally explained by selection or fitness. The causalist side, on the other hand, holds that populations can change in response to selection—one can cite fitness differences or driftability in causal explanations of evolutionary change. But, on the causalist side, it is often not clear how, precisely, one should understand these causes. Thus, much more could be said about what sort of causes fitness and driftability are. In this paper, I borrow Dretske's distinction between structuring and triggering causes and I suggest that fitness and driftability are structuring causes of evolution.     

O’Connor’s argument for indeterminism

Timothy O’Connor has recently defended a version of libertarianism that has significant advantages over similar accounts. One of these is an argument that secures indeterminism on the basis of an argument that shows how causal determinism threatens agency in virtue of the nature of the causal relation involved in free acts. In this paper, I argue that while it does turn out that free acts are not causally determined on O’Connor’s view, this fact is merely stipulative and the argument that he presents for this conclusion begs the question.