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This chapter presents the two most important views about cosmology held by Muslims in the era of al-Ghazali. The first is the cosmology of the Ash’arite school of Muslim theology, which developed earlier ideas of the Mu’tazilites into what has become knows as occasionalism. Its main components are the atomism of the earlier Mu’tazilites plus the idea that time is a leaped sequence of moments. The latter idea is sometimes called an “atomism of time.” In every moment, God rearranges all the atoms of this world and creates their accidents anew—thus creating a new world every moment that is not causally connected to the one in the moment before. The Muslim philosophers subscribed to a different cosmology where God is regarded as the first cause of all events in this work. Here, God does not act directly on all its creatures but only through the mediation of so-called secondary causes. Every cause is caused by another cause etc. until this chain ends in God, the first cause. The chapter shows how the usual view that these two cosmologies are diametrically opposed to one another cannot be maintained and that al-Juwayni, for instance, al-Ghazali’s teacher, already applies a cosmology where he applies elements of both systems.

This chapter describes how Kant’s views on causality, which contrast starkly with both his empiricist and his rationalist predecessors, are developed in most abstract form in the principles and arguments of the Critique of Pure Reason’s Second and Third Analogies of Experience. It then shows that a model of causality involving substances and causal powers rather than events is entailed by these causal principles, and how it can be illustrated with examples of physical forces as expressed in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. In light of this rather generic account of causality, the chapter then describes the essential features of Kant’s account of efficient causality in particular, especially as it is discussed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, where Kant contrasts mechanistic, efficient causality with the kind of teleology that is found in organisms.

This paper examines an important but neglected topic in Suárez’s metaphysics–—namely, his theory of efficient causation. According to Suárez, efficient causation is to be identified with action, one of Aristotle’s ten highest genera or categories. The paper shows how Suárez’s identification of efficient causation with action helps to shed light on his views about the precise nature of efficient causation, and its role in his ontology. More specifically, it shows that Suárez understands efficient causation to be a distinctive or sui generis type of entity, and that he thinks we must adopt this view in order to account for the facts of efficient causation. The paper also examines several objections to Suárez’s account.

This chapter presents a distinctively modern combination of views about causality that only efficient causality is true causality, and that recursive or circular causality is impossible. It is argued that this combination of views is responsible for the stalemate in which philosophical action theory currently finds itself. Philosophical points of view regarding the nature of intention and how it causes an agent’s behavior are part of the long history of philosophy. This philosophical problem of action is deeply tied to the problem of causation and the nature and roots of meaningful behavior. Philosophical equivalents of epicyclic contortions, which are designed to fit the analysis of action into the modern notion of efficient causality, are outlined here. In these equivalents, intentional causes are understood as instantaneous forces that push the body into motion in billiard-ball-like fashion, implying the failure of standard causalist theories of action.

Medieval philosophical theologians thought that they had solved the problem of how God and creatures can be alike genuine agents in producing the world as we know it. But could God and creatures share genuine agency, when it comes to counting creatures and their actions worthy of eternal life? All agreed: God’s contribution was to elevate created agents by making them holy. Thinkers from Lombard to Ockham saw God as doing that in two ways: through a distinctive kind of presence and through extra efficient-causal contributions. After Lombard, both were seen to involve Divinely infused habits. Debates about the role of infused habits led to refinements of the concept of genuine created agency. The attempt at philosophical accounts of the special kinds of presence that some but not other Divine persons could have to some but not other creatures, at first provoked conceptual experimentation with appeals to hypostatic union or primitive relations, but later ran to verbal accommodations of the theological authorities.

Ockham argues that we should identify the source of productive activity in the same way we identify the cause of an effect. For Ockham, the cause of an effect is that which must be posited in order to posit the effect, and without which the effect cannot be posited at all. Similarly, says Ockham, the source of a production is that which must be posited in order to posit that production, and without which that production cannot be posited. In the divine case, that is just the divine essence, but this does not mean that the divine essence produces anything, nor does it mean that the productions themselves are produced. On the contrary, says Ockham, the divine essence is simply the source of production, whereas the two sides of each production (i.e. the correlative activities of “producing another” and “being produced”) serve to constitute a distinct producer and product.

The debate between Alexander and Galen on Aristotle’s argument in Physics VII.1 that anything that moves is moved by something is currently understood as restricted to the question of the validity of this argument. This article questions this understanding and argues that (1) this debate directly bears on the tenability of the thesis that Aristotle’s argument establishes, and (2) it is rooted in an even more fundamental disagreement over hylomorphism and efficient causality. In substantiating these conclusions, the article examines Galen’s argument against Aristotle in light of his notion of dunamis and his account of antecedent causes. It also analyses fragments from Alexander’s lost commentary on the Physics, where the validity of Aristotle’s argument in Physics VII.1 is directly discussed and shows that he addresses Galen’s criticism through the view found in his De anima and elsewhere that substantial forms are causal factors and that external causes are the primary efficient causes.