Abstract:

This dissertation concerns Aristotle's position regarding causal determinism. I understand determinism roughly as the combination of two distinct propositions: (1) that, for everything that occurs, there is a cause (this is the Principle of Universal Causation) and (2) that, whenever there is a cause of what occurs, the cause causally necessitates what it causes (this I call 'the Sufficient Condition view of causation'). My Aristotle is doubly an indeterminist since he denies both of these two propositions.

Chapter one argues that, given Aristotle's ontological stance and also given his understanding of (efficient) causation in terms of the power of the natures/arts of things/people, Aristotle's account of what is in-itself (kath'hauto ) to something and what is accidental (( kata ) sumbeb?kos ) shows that he believes that even in-itself, that is, proper causes sometimes fail to cause what they normally cause (even while being active as causes). Meanwhile, I show that there are several distinctions that are important to us in contemporary thought about causation and related matters which Aristotle either does not make or does not maintain as consistently as we think one should. These include distinctions: (1) between what is particular and what is general, (2) between modality de re and modality de dicto , and (3) between predication and causation. I argue that this peculiar feature of Aristotle's philosophy is readily understandable when we acknowledge how fundamentally different Aristotle's ontological stance is from ours.

In chapter two, I argue first that accidents (now in the sense of accidents that happen), according to Aristotle, have objective existence independent of how much we know about the world or of how we describe the world with our language. I also argue that, in some cases of accidental causation recognized by Aristotle, there is (and, given his ontological stance, should be) nothing that Aristotle would acknowledge as the cause of what results.

Throughout this dissertation, I maintain that we should approach Aristotle's theory of causation by understanding causes as things/substances, not as events as contemporary theories of causation do. Our notion of an event, applied to Aristotle's theory of causation, introduces implicit metaphysical assumptions antithetical to Aristotle's philosophy.