Cartesian causation: Continuous, instantaneous, overdetermined

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 42, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 389-423

  Gorham, Geoffrey ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN EAU CLAIRE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249182697     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2004.0066     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. For discussion, see Kenneth Clatterbaugh, "Descartes's Causal Likeness Principle," Philosophical Review, 89 (1980): 379-402,
2. Eileen O'Neill, "Mind-Body Interaction and Metaphysical Consistency: A Defense of Descartes, " Journal of the History of Philosophy, 25 (1987): 227-45
3. and Geoffrey Gorham, "Descartes on the Innateness of all Ideas," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 32 (2002): 355-88.
4. For a detailed discussion of the sort of causality involved in divine self-creation, see Daniel E. Flage and Clarence A. Bonnen, "Descartes on Causation," The Review of Metaphysics, 50 (1997): 841-72.
5. (See also Étienne Gilson, Descartes's Discours de la Méthode. [Paris: J. Vrin, 1925], 420,
6. This objection is mentioned by Richard Arthur, "Continuous Creation, Continuous Time: A Refutation of the Alleged Discontinuity of Cartesian Time," Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 (1988): 349-75, esp. 354.
7. See also Daniel Garber, "How God Causes Motion: Descartes, Divine Sustenance and Occasionalism," in Descartes Embodied, 189-202, esp. 194;
8. J.E.K Secada, "Descartes on Time and Causality," The Philosophical Review 99 (1990), 45-72, esp. 62-66;
9. Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 325, n.88;
10. Harry Frankfurt, "Continuous Creation, Ontological Inertia, and the Discontinuity of Time," in Harry Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 66-67;
11. For defenses of the necessary continuity of Cartesian time, see Jean LaPorte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 158-60
12. and Jean-Marie Beyssade, La Philosophie Première de Descartes (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), especially ch. 3 and Conclusion.
13. See also Frankfurt, "Continuous Creation, Ontological Inertia, and the Discontinuity of Time," 66.
14. Daniel Garber, Descartes's Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 264;
15. Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (London: Penguin Press, 1978), 149;
16. Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968), 144;
17. Norman Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 129-30;
18. and Harry Frankfurt, "Continuous Creation, Ontological Inertia, and the Discontinuity of Time," 62-63.
19. On the ancient and medieval ancestry of the condition of causal simultaneity, see William A. Wallace, "Aquinas on the Temporal Relation between Cause and Effect," Review of Metaphysics 27 (1974): 569-84
20. and Secada, "Descartes on Time and Causality," 49-51.
21. For a detailed philosophical analysis, see Myles Brand, "Simultaneous Causation," in Time and Cause: Essays Presented to Richard Taylor, Peter van Inwagen, ed. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980), 137-53.
22. Peter McLaughlin, "Descartes on Mind-Body Interac-tion and the Conservation of Motion," Philosophical Review 102 (1993): 155-82, see 178.
23. For detailed discussions of God as the cause of all motions in the physical world see Gary Hatfield, "Force (God) in Descartes's Physics," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 10 (1979): 113-40,
24. Such as Louis de la Forge. For discussion see Steven Nadler, "Louis de La Forge and the Development of Occasionalism: Continuous Creation and the Activity of the Soul," Journal of the History of Philosophy 36 (1998): 215-31.
25. Helen Hattab, "The Problem of Secondary Causation in Descartes: A Response to Des Chene," Perspectives on Science, 8 (2000) : 93-118;
26. Andrew Pessin, "Descartes's Nomic Concurrentism: Finite Causation and Divine Concurrence," Journal of the History of Philosophy, 41 (2003): 25-49;
27. See Alfred J. Freddoso, "God's General Concurrence with Secondary Causes: Prospects and Pitfalls," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 67 (1994): 131-56, esp. 132-34, and his book-length introduction to MD.
28. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Vernon J. Bourke, trans. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 237.
29. See also Summa Theologica, Fathers of the Dominican Republic, trans., in Great Books of the Western World, vols. 19 and 20 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Inc., 1952), 535, Q. 104, a.1 and Q. 105, a.5.
30. Des Chene, "On Laws and Ends: A Response to Hattab and Menn," Perspectives on Science 8 (2000), 144-63, see 153.
31. Along with Pessin, Vere Chappell also suggests that the letter to Elizabeth can be read in concurrentist terms, though he does not elaborate on the precise nature of the concurrence he has in mind (Vere Chappell, "Descartes's Compatiblism," in Reason, Will and Sensation: Studies in Descartes's Metaphysics, John Cottingham, ed. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], 184).
32. I do not mean to suggest mat total cause (causa totalis) is a technical term in Descartes's writings. In scholastic philosophy, a total cause is a cause which, unlike a partial cause does not need an additional cause of the same species. But there is no reason an effect could not have two total concurring causes since in that case one cause would be subordinated to the other. For example, Suarez says that it is not contradictory for the same action to proceed from two total causes, so long as they are "essentially ordered" to one another as concurrent causes rather than parts of a single cause (Francisco Suarez, On Efficient Causality: Metaphysical Disputations 17, 18, and 19. Alfred J. Freddoso, trans. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994], 18, 1, 9).
33. Overdetermination is a ongoing problem in the philosophy of causality. The issue in these discussions is not so much whether there can be genuine causal overdetermination, as whether overdetermination can be accounted for by theories of causation which hold that causes are in some sense necessary for their effects. For discussion, see J. L. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 43-47
34. and David Lewis, "Causation" in his Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 207-12. There is also considerable discussion of overdetermination in contemporary philosophy of mind, where the question is whether some states are overdetermined by mental and physical causes.
35. See, for example, Stephen Yablo, "Mental Causation," Philosophical Studies 101 (1992): 245-80.
36. For an interesting discussion of this passage, see Tad Schmaltz, "Human Freedom and Divine Creation in Descartes, Malebranche and the Cartesians," British Journal for the History of Philosophy 2 (1994): 3-50, see 15-16.
37. For further defense of the compatiblist interpretation, see Paul Hoffman, "Freedom and Strength of Will: Descartes and Albritton," Philosophical Studies 77 (1995): 241-60.
38. Michelle Beyssade, "Descartes's Doctrine of Freedom: Differences between French and Latin Editions of the Fourth Meditation," in Reason, Will and Sensation: Studies in Descartes's Metaphysics, John Cottingham, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
39. For a detailed discussion of both letters, see Anthony Kenny, "Descartes on the Will," in The Anatomy of the Soul: Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (London: Blackwell Press, 1973).
40. For forceful critiques of the Leibnizian reading, see Peter Remnant, "Descartes: Body and Soul," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 9) (1979): 377-86,
41. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, W. F. Trotter, trans. (New York: The Modern Library, 1941), 29.
42. See also Geoffrey Gorham, "Mind-Body Dualism and the Harvey-Descartes Controversy," Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1994): 211-34.