This will be considered merely in outline, as filled in in the following more detailed account of the doctrines of the Schoolmen upon the subject, who, while adopting it in all its main lines, in several respects modified the teaching of the Stagirite.
#FINAL CAUSALITY FULL#
We shall begin, therefore, with the first crude conception of power or efficiency, and pass on through the stages of hyloism and idealism to the full analysis of cause and statement of causality made by Aristotle. It will probably be found, when we attempt to formulate any answer to the question, that much more is involved than we had at first sight thought and, since the investigation we should pursue would probably proceed upon lines analogous to those upon which philosophy has, as a matter of fact, travelled, it will not be amiss to trace the history and development of the problem concerned with causes and causality, and to set down briefly the various solutions advanced. It will be the expression of our judgment as to the actual relationship between A and B involved in the conception of the one as cause and of the other as effect. Whatever answer we put forward, it will be the statement of our conception of causation. But when we proceed to ask ourselves precisely what we mean when we say, for example, that A is cause and B effect, that A causes B, or that B is the result of A, we raise the question of causality. No necessarily conscious reflection seems to enter into the judgment that partitions natural things into causes and effects. Objects of sense are grouped roughly into two classes-those that act and those that are acted upon. This natural attribution of the relationship of cause and effect to phenomena is anterior to all philosophical statement and analysis. There is also a psychological, as well as a metaphysical, aspect of the subject, which ought not to be lost sight of, especially in that part of the article in which the more recent speculations with regard to causality are touched upon.Īs a matter of fact, all mankind by nature attributes to certain phenomena a causative action upon others.
In view of this fact, it will be necessary to clear the ground traversed in the main portion of the present article by stating that it is concerned, not so much in treating of individual causes considered in the concrete, as with the analysis of the idea of causality underlying and involved in that of every cause. Although the ideas of cause and of causality are quite obviously among the most familiar that we possess, since they are involved in every exercise of human reasoning, and are presupposed in every form of argument and by every practical action, a very great vagueness attaches to the popular concept of them and a correspondingly great ambiguity is to be found in the use of the terms expressing them. It is that also commonly advanced as a preliminary to the investigation of the nature of causality, in the schools. The description just given is that of cause taken in the philosophical sense, as well as in its ordinary signification in popular language, for, strictly speaking, cause, being a transcendental, cannot receive a logical definition.
The term cause is also employed in several other suppositions, philosophical, scientific, legal, etc., to which reference will be made in the course of the present article. (Greek aitía, aítion, Latin causa, French cause, German Ursache from the Latin both the Italian term cosa and the French chose, meaning "thing", are derived).Ĭause, as the correlative of effect, is understood as being that which in any way gives existence to, or contributes towards the existence of, any thing which produces a result to which the origin of any thing is to be ascribed. Hegel and Schopenhauer, Cause in Science, Common Sense, Cause in Law Material Cause, Formal Cause, Efficient Cause, Final Cause
0 kommentar(er)
