Sullivan on the principle that everything has a cause

Dialogue-Canadian Philosophical Review

Volumn 41, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 427-438

  Garcia Encinas M J ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DEUSTO   (Spain)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950119987     PISSN: 00122173     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0012217300005205     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. See Thomas D. Sullivan's "Coming to Be Without a Cause," Philosophy, 65 (1990): 261-70
2. and "On the Alleged Causeless Beginning of the Universe: A Reply to Quentin Smith," Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 33 (1994): 325-35.
3. Quentin Smith, "Can Everything Come to Be Without a Cause?," Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 33 (1994): 313-23
4. and Chad Allen, "The Principle of Sufficient Reason and the Uncaused Beginning of the Universe," Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 36 (1997): 555-62.
5. Sullivan, "Coming to Be," p. 268
6. and Sullivan, "On the Alleged," p. 329. In the main text, I have skipped the condition "in a situations," as I think that causes are necessary conditions in any circumstance. Either way, the general discussion is not affected whether the condition is taken into account or not.
7. and Smith, "Can EverythingCome to Be," p. 317.
8. Sullivan is not arguing, like Hobbes, that everything that has a beginning in time has a cause of its beginning in time because to exist in time and to be caused are, in some way, intimately related concepts. See Thomas Hobbes, Treatise, Of Liberty and Necessity, in V. Chappell, ed. , Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 15-42
9. prop. 33, pp. 39-40.
10. Allen, "The Principle of Sufficient Reason," pp. 558-60.
11. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), Vol. 8, I, q. 44, a 1.
12. Remember Hume's words against the principle of causation: "[I]t will be easy for us to conceive any object to be non-existent this moment, and existent the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea of a cause or productive principle. The separation, therefore, of the idea of a cause from that of a beginning of existence, is plainly possible for the imagination; and consequently the actual separation of these objects is so far possible, that it implies no contradiction nor absurdity; and is therefore incapable of being refuted by any reasoning from mere ideas" (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), I, iii, iii, pp. 79-80). It could be pointed out, against my conclusion in the text, that Hume is claiming that the idea of the beginning of existence of something is clearly separable from the idea of cause while Aquinas argues that in the idea of something there is no reference to a cause. However, Hume probably used the expression "the beginning of existence of a thing" to note, contra Hobbes, that even if every thing begins to exist in time, this fact does not show that it is caused. Hume, then, is not including in his argument the notion of existence that Aquinas will use to argue that everything is necessarily caused. On the other hand, Aquinas's argumentation is independent of temporal considerations: he believes that the relation to the cause is demonstrable whether things begin in time or not. So we can say that both arguments are parallel to this extent: both deny an a priori demonstration of the principle of causation from the consideration of the ideas or concepts of the things that occur, by hypothesis, causally related. (The parallelism remains even if it is also true that Aquinas's ideas are closer to a contemporary notion of concept while Hume's ideas are more like mental images. )
13. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Vol. 2, I, q. 3, a 4.
14. Aquinas, "On Being and Essence," in Aquinas on Being and Essence, translated and interpreted by J. Bobik (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), pp. 160-61, para. 80.
15. On the controversy see, for example, Milton K. Munitz, Existence and Logic (New York: New York University Press, 1974), chaps. 4 and 5
16. and Reinhardt Grossmann, The Existence of the World: An Introduction to Ontology (New York: Routledge, 1992), chap. 4.
17. and "whatever belongs to a thing is either caused by the principles of its nature . . . or comes to it from some extrinsic principle" ("On Being and Essence," para. 80).
18. This, I believe, indicates that Aquinas himself assumed the principle of causation in his proof for the creation of everything. See also Norman Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Creation: Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa contra gentiles, II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 65-66.