File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2001/bhaskar.0103, message 63


Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 17:42:09 -0500 (EST)
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: BHA: to Marsh


Hi Marsh,

Since I am very fond of Aristotle's causes, I wanted to respond to your
comments. (!)

You wrote:

>I've been reading with interest the debate over events as causes. I'm
>surprised nobody has brought up the Aristotelian distinction between
>material, formal, efficient, and final cause. As Harre' says, "to grasp the
>purport of this concept [the essential nature of a thing] it is necessary to
>distinguish between occurrences which happen of necessity and those which
>happen by chance" (_The Philosophies of Science_, 126). 

I'm sure I'm just a step behind here, but I'm not seeing the immediate
connection between Aristotle's typology and the Harre quotation.  "The
essential nature of a thing" could refer either to its form or its telos, it
seems to me (and in general, expressed abstractly, the telos of a thing,
says Aristotle, is precisely to realize, or actualize, its form).  So I
wasn't quite sure which sense of causality you were relating the quotation
to: formal or final or both? Can you spell this out a little bit for me?
(Sorry to be dense about this.)


>Could one consider Da as formal cause (formal in the sense of a specific form) 

Actually, can you do the same for this?!  I'm really curious, but I don't
get it!


>and Dr as combining material and efficient causes?

I think that in RTS, anyway, Bhaskar was primarily advancing an account of
efficient cause.  (I'm sorry to have to limit my feedback in this way, but
the original account of natural science is the part of RB's work that I've
thought the most about.)  I think that the crux of this theory was that
efficient cause is a matter of the exercise of powers -- powers that are
borne by what Bhaskar there calls "things."

So efficient causality is a matter of "things" having the power to effect
change, including the bringing about of events/states of affairs.  But I
don't think that I would locate *material* cause there.  Aristotelian
material cause (I think) is more like "that which is acted UPON" (by the
bearer of efficient cause).

What do you think?

r. 
>



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