Re: BHA:reasons as causes

["Andrew Brown" <Andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Howard,

i would say that the crucial point for CR/DCR is to establish
thought as defining a stratum of reality. this is what PON tries to
do. so it seems to me that we would expect the 'causal power' of
thought to be of the same *type* as the causal power of any other
stratum, ie. of a type that allows us to attribute (irreducible) reality
to the stratum.

is this 'efficient' cause or what? well, it is, as PON says,
'generative' or tendential. It doesn't give us event regularities. But I
am inclined to see this as efficient causality in the sense that each
tendency in play in any one conjuncture is an individual efficient
cause; the combination of these causes gives us the actual effect.
This becomes clearer if one condsiders that, in the experimental
set up, each cause does give an event regularity.

So it would seem that 'efficient' causality is required to distinguish
a separate stratum. If so then 'thought' must indeed be an efficient
cause if the CR/DCR case is to hold.

But to tell the truth i'm pretty unclear on these different
(Aristotelian) types of cause so look forward to being corrected...

Andy

On 29 Nov 2000, at 2:42, lynne engelskirchen wrote:

>
>
> 6 weeks ago I wrote to ask what there was in CR or DCR that depended on a
> strong concept of reasons as efficient causes, that is, as the agent of
> change the way lightning is an efficient cause of fire.  I used the example
> presented by Anthony Kenny in Freewill and REsponsibility: while not eating
> is a cause of death, hunger is a reason, not a cause, of eating.  (Kenny's
> example is better than his explanation -- he argues that reasons can't be
> causes because they do not meet the requirements of a Humean "covering
> law."  I also mentioned that no one, and not Kenny, would challenge the
> idea that reasons were final causes capable of explaining the purpose
> behind an action.)
>
> Reading the following snippet from Marx, The HOly Family, CW 4, 129, raised
> the issue for me again:
>
> "Body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same reality.  It
> is impossible to separate the thought from the matter that thinks.  This
> matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world."
>
> Applying this insight:  hunger (in the sense of a reason to eat) cannot be
> a cause of eating the way lightning is a cause of fire or not eating a
> cause of death because it cannot be separated from matter that thinks.  Not
> eating is something that matter that thinks *does.*  Hunger is something
> that matter that thinks *thinks*.  Not eating is efficiently causal in that
> it sets in motion the biological processes that lead to death.  It's
> matter's "doing" that changes the world, though it's the intending that
> makes the doing human.
>
> ?
>
>
> Howard
>
>
>
>
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