Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Powers, Time and Free WillWhat’s Dynamic About Causal Powers? A Black Box!

Powers, Time and Free Will: What’s Dynamic About Causal Powers? A Black Box! [Modern science cannot do without Aristotelian powers – thus have argued Cartwright and Pemberton (2013) among many others. Aristotelian powers are essentially dynamic entities, which account for causal phenomena, and thus explain how change comes about in the world. In this chapter I argue that explaining causation in terms of interacting causal powers places causation … beyond the reach of our understanding(!) – because causal interaction shows us what powers do, and not what powers are. Metaphysicians by and large agree that the intrinsic nature of powers is to be dynamic entities. I contend here that their dynamism is irreducible, and crucially, unknowable, rendering what powers are ‘black boxes’ to us, despite multiple attempts of defining them in the literature. The sciences discover only how powers behave, and classify them teleologically to tell us what they do. Powers, however, are mysterious and unexplorable black boxes to us, even though they are indispensable in our scientific explanations of change in the world.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Powers, Time and Free WillWhat’s Dynamic About Causal Powers? A Black Box!

Part of the Synthese Library Book Series (volume 451)
Editors: Austin, Christopher J.; Marmodoro, Anna; Roselli, Andrea
Marmodoro, Anna
Powers, Time and Free Will — Mar 29, 2022
Download PDF
14 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/powers-time-and-free-will-what-s-dynamic-about-causal-powers-a-black-AQC6UOIldD

References (0)

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. Chapters [2] and [4] are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see licence information in the chapters.
ISBN
978-3-030-92485-0
Pages
1 –15
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-92486-7_1
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Modern science cannot do without Aristotelian powers – thus have argued Cartwright and Pemberton (2013) among many others. Aristotelian powers are essentially dynamic entities, which account for causal phenomena, and thus explain how change comes about in the world. In this chapter I argue that explaining causation in terms of interacting causal powers places causation … beyond the reach of our understanding(!) – because causal interaction shows us what powers do, and not what powers are. Metaphysicians by and large agree that the intrinsic nature of powers is to be dynamic entities. I contend here that their dynamism is irreducible, and crucially, unknowable, rendering what powers are ‘black boxes’ to us, despite multiple attempts of defining them in the literature. The sciences discover only how powers behave, and classify them teleologically to tell us what they do. Powers, however, are mysterious and unexplorable black boxes to us, even though they are indispensable in our scientific explanations of change in the world.]

Published: Mar 29, 2022

Keywords: Causal powers; Dynamism; Causation; Scientific explanation

There are no references for this article.