Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Causation

  • John Bigelow’s Lucretian Defense of Presentism, Part I, Set-Up

    What follows in two parts is a critique of John Bigelow's Presentism and Properties. This installment is Part One. Bigelow begins by telling us that he is a presentist: "nothing exists which is not present." (35) He goes on to say that this was believed by everyone, including philosophers, until the 19th century. But this…

  • Explanation and Understanding: More on Bogardus

    What follows are some further ruminations occasioned by the article by Tomas Bogardus first referenced and commented upon here. I will begin by explaining the distinction between personal and impersonal explanations.  The explanation I am about to give is itself a personal explanation, as should become clear after I define 'personal explanation.' A lightning bolt…

  • The Spook Stuff Chronicles

    Danny Dennett meets Caspar the Friendly Ghost. Stack leader. In Dennett's case, de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est has expired.

  • Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

    Substack latest. Does causation have a moral dimension? This upload was 'occasioned' (all puns intended) by my meeting with the amazing Steven Nemes yesterday at Joe's Real BBQ in charming old town Gilbert. Among the topics we discussed were idolatry, desire, and Buddhism. He strode up, gave me a hug, and handed me three books…

  • From the Mail Bag: Occasionalism

    A reader  e-mails: Great blog, thanks for writing it! Are you familiar with the writings of the Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali and his idea now called "Occasionalism"?  It seems to me that the person of faith must give up his/her faith in cause and effect for the supernatural to make sense, and Al-Ghazali seems to be…

  • If God Cannot Cause Himself, How Can He Know Himself?

    This from a reader: If we say God cannot create himself since this implies a contradiction (God existing prior to himself to act on himself), how can we say God does anything with regard to himself? For instance, we say God knows himself. But how is this possible, seeing as God would need to first…

  • Same Cause, Same Referent? More on the ‘Same God’ Problem

    Tree and Scarecrow Suppose I point out a certain tree in the distance to Dale and remark upon its strange shape.  I say, "That tree has a strange shape."  Dale responds, "That's not a tree; that's a scarecrow!"  Suppose we are looking at the same thing, a physical thing that exists in the external world…

  • Is Natural Causation Existence-Conferring?

    When I reported to Peter Lupu over Sunday breakfast that Hugh McCann denies that natural causation is existence-conferring, he demanded to know McCann's reasons.  He has three. I'll discuss one of them in this post, the third one McCann mentions. (Creation and the Sovereignty of God, p. 18) The reason is essentially Humean.  Rather than…

  • Causation, Existence, and the Modified Leibniz Question

    Letting 'CCB' abbreviate 'concrete contingent beings,' we may formulate the modified Leibniz question as follows: Why are there any CCBs at all?  We have been discussing whether this question is a pseudo-question.  To be precise, we have been discussing whether it is a pseudo-question on the assumption that it does not collapse into one or more…

  • Could the Universe Cause Itself to Exist?

    I recently considered and rejected the suggestion that a universe with a metrically infinite past has the resources to explain its own existence.  But what if, as the cosmologists tell us, the universe is only finitely old? Could a variant of the first argument be nonetheless mounted?  Surprisingly, yes.  Unsurprisingly, it fails. The following also…

  • Memory, Memory Traces, and Causation

    Passing a lady in the supermarket I catch a whiff of patchouli.  Her scent puts me in mind of hippy-trippy Pamela from the summer of '69.  An olfactory stimulus in the present causes a memory, also in the present, of an event long past, a tête-à-tête with a certain girl.  How ordinary, but how strange! Suddenly…

  • Representation and Causation, with Some Help from Putnam

    1. Materialism would be very attractive if only it could be made to work. Unfortunately, there are a number of phenomena for which it has no satisfactory explanation. One such is the phenomenon ofrepresentation, whether mental or linguistic. Some mental states are of or about worldly individuals and states of affairs. This fact comes under…

  • Causal Interaction: A Problem for the Materialist Too!

    Ed Feser has been giving Paul Churchland a well-deserved drubbing over at his blog and I should like to join in on the fun, at least in the in the first main paragraph of this post. One of the standard objections to substance dualism in the philosophy of mind is that the substance dualist cannot…

  • Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

    What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite? That our desire is infinite is shown…

  • Hume: Occasionalism Without God?

    I wonder if I can get any of my esteemed readers to swallow the following suggestion. Ten years or so ago it came into my head that Hume's analysis of causation in terms of (i) temporal precedence, (ii) spatiotemporal contiguity, and (iii) constant conjunction can be reasonably viewed as occasionalism without God.