PUBLISHED IN THE OXFORD PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS SERIES
Efficient Causation
Edited by Tad Schmaltz
Sympathy
Edited by Eric Schliesser
The Faculties
Edited by Dominik Perler
Memory
Edited by Dmitri Nikulin
Moral Motivation
Edited by Iakovos Vasiliou
Eternity
Edited by Yitzhak Melamed
Self-Knowledge
Edited by Ursula Renz
Embodiment
Edited by Justin E. H. Smith
Dignity
Edited by Remy Debes
Animals
Edited by G. Fay Edwards and Peter Adamson
Pleasure
Edited by Lisa Shapiro
Health
Edited by Peter Adamson
Evil
Edited by Andrew Chignell
Persons
Edited by Antonia LoLordo
Space
Edited by Andrew Janiak
Teleology
Edited by Jeffrey K. McDonough
The World Soul
Edited by James Wilberding
Powers
Edited by Julia Jorati
The Self
Edited by Patricia Kitcher
FORTHCOMING IN THE OXFORD PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS SERIES
Modality
Edited by Yitzhak Melamed
Human
Karolina Hubner
Love
Edited by Ryan Hanley
The Principle of Sufficient Reason
Edited by Fatema Amijee and Michael Della Rocca
Powers
A History
Edited by Julia Jorati
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jorati, Julia, editor.
Title: Powers : a history / edited by Julia Jorati.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Series: Oxford philosophical concepts series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020050560 (print) | LCCN 2020050561 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190925512 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190925529 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190925543 (epub) | 9780190925550 (online) | 9780190925536 (updf)
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
Series Editor’s Foreword vii
Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Julia Jorati
1 Causal Powers in Aristotle and His Predecessors 10
Anna Marmodoro
2 Platonic and Stoic Powers 28 D. T. J. Bailey
Reflection: Power, Nature, Body, Soul, Music 49
Andrew Hicks
3 Emanationist Powers: Plotinus, Theology of Aristotle, and Ibn Gabirol 56
Sarah Pessin
4 The Power of Possibility: Power, Nature, and Possibility in Avicenna 82
Jon McGinnis
Reflection: Bâ on Power 107
Monika Brodnicka
5 Causal Powers in the Latin Christian West 112
Peter King
6 Causal Powers and Ontology in Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz 143
Jeffrey K. McDonough
Reflection: Taming Material Powers: From Paracelsus to Frankenstein 163
Mi Gyung Kim
7 The Power of Self-Motion in Cavendish’s Nature 169
Marcy P. Lascano
8 “Plastick Powers” and the Power of Sympathy in Cudworth and More: The Spirit of Nature and Plastic Nature 189
Sarah Hutton
Reflection: Locating Powers in Early-Modern Religious Imagery 214
Andrew R. Casper
9 Powers in Britain, 1689–1827 220
Antonia LoLordo
10 The Metaphysics of Powers in Kant and Hegel 243
Clinton Tolley
11 Powers in Contemporary Philosophy 271
Jennifer McKitrick
Bibliography 295
Index 317
Series Editor’s Foreword
Oxford Philosophical Concepts (OPC) offers an innovative approach to philosophy’s past and its relation to other disciplines. As a series, it is unique in exploring the transformations of central philosophical concepts from their ancient sources to their modern use.
OPC has several goals: to make it easier for historians to contextualize key concepts in the history of philosophy, to render that history accessible to a wide audience, and to enliven contemporary discussions by displaying the rich and varied sources of philosophical concepts still in use today. The means to these goals are simple enough: eminent scholars come together to rethink a central concept in philosophy’s past. The point of this rethinking is not to offer a broad overview, but to identify problems the concept was originally supposed to solve and investigate how approaches to them shifted over time, sometimes radically.
Recent scholarship has made evident the benefits of reexamining the standard narratives about western philosophy. OPC’s editors look beyond the canon and explore their concepts over a wide philosophical landscape. Each volume traces a notion from its inception as a solution to specific problems through its historical transformations to its modern use, all the while acknowledging its historical context. Each OPC volume is a history of its concept in that it tells a story about changing solutions to its well-defined problem. Many editors have
found it appropriate to include long-ignored writings drawn from the Islamic and Jewish traditions and the philosophical contributions of women. Volumes also explore ideas drawn from Buddhist, Chinese, Indian, and other philosophical cultures when doing so adds an especially helpful new perspective. By combining scholarly innovation with focused and astute analysis, OPC encourages a deeper understanding of our philosophical past and present.
One of the most innovative features of OPC is its recognition that philosophy bears a rich relation to art, music, literature, religion, science, and other cultural practices. The series speaks to the need for informed interdisciplinary exchanges. Its editors assume that the most difficult and profound philosophical ideas can be made comprehensible to a large audience and that materials not strictly philosophical often bear a significant relevance to philosophy. To this end, each OPC volume includes Reflections. These are short stand-alone essays written by specialists in art, music, literature, theology, science, or cultural studies that reflect on the concept from their own disciplinary perspectives. The goal of these essays is to enliven, enrich, and exemplify the volume’s concept and reconsider the boundary between philosophical and extra-philosophical materials. OPC’s Reflections display the benefits of using philosophical concepts and distinctions in areas that are not strictly philosophical, and encourage philosophers to move beyond the borders of their discipline as presently conceived.
The volumes of OPC arrive at an auspicious moment. Many philosophers are keen to invigorate the discipline. OPC aims to provoke philosophical imaginations by uncovering the brilliant twists and unforeseen turns of philosophy’s past.
Christia Mercer
Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy
Columbia University in the City of New York
Contributors
D. T. J. Bailey is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He studied philosophy and classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and is the author of several papers on the history of philosophy, mainly on Plato and Stoicism.
Monika Brodnicka is Assistant Professor of African Studies and an Academic Director at the School for International Training in Senegal. Her research, supported by two Fulbright scholarships, focuses on West African indigenous religions and literature. She has published in journals such as Journal on African Philosophy and Journal of Religion in Africa and is currently completing a monograph on the metaphysical dimension of West African religions.
Andrew R. Casper is Associate Professor of Art History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where he specializes in late 16th- and early 17th-century religious imagery in Italy. He is the author of Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy (Penn State University Press, 2014) and An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy (Penn State University Press, 2021).
Andrew Hicks is Associate Professor of Music and Medieval Studies at Cornell University. His research focuses on the intellectual history of musical and philosophical thought from cross-disciplinary perspectives. His first book, Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.
Sarah Hutton is Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of York. Her research focuses on the history of early modern philosophy, with special interests in the Cambridge Platonists and women philosophers. Her publications include British Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Anne Conway, a Woman Philosopher (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Julia Jorati is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research focuses on early modern philosophy. She is the author of Leibniz on Causation and Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and of numerous articles on early modern metaphysics, philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, and political philosophy.
Mi Gyung Kim is Professor of History at North Carolina State University. She has worked on chemical affinity, cultural history of ballooning, and French Enlightenment. Her current project is tentatively titled “Moral Enlightenment and Useful Sciences.”
Peter King is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto; he has also taught at Fordham University, the University of Pittsburgh, and The Ohio State University. He received his doctorate from Princeton University in 1982. Since then he has published scholarly articles, translations, and critical editions of a wide variety of philosophers.
Marcy P. Lascano is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on early modern women philosophers, including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, and Emilie Du Châtelet. She is co-editor with Eileen O’Neill of Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought (Springer, 2019).
Antonia LoLordo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia and a founding editor of the Journal of Modern Philosophy. Her publications include Locke’s Moral Man (Oxford University Press, 2012), Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and numerous papers. She edited the volume Persons (Oxford University Press, 2019) in this series.
Anna Marmodoro is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University and an affiliated member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Her research interests span metaphysics, ancient philosophy, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion. She has written and edited numerous books and essay collections, including Forms and Structure in Plato’s Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2021), Metaphysics: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates and Their History (with Erasmus Mayr, Oxford University Press, 2019), and Mind and Body in Late Antiquity (with Sophie Cartwright, Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Jeffrey K. McDonough is Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. His work focuses on the intersection of philosophy, science, and religion in the early modern era. He has written numerous articles on early modern philosophy and is currently editing a volume in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series on the history of the concept of teleology. For more on his work, visit scholar. harvard.edu/mcdonough.
Jon McGinnis is Professor of Classical and Medieval Philosophy at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of Avicenna in the Oxford University Press’s Great Medieval Thinkers series (2010), translator and editor of Avicenna’s Physics (Brigham Young University Press, 2009) and co-translator with David C. Reisman of Classical Arabic Philosophy: An Anthology of Sources (Hackett, 2007).
Jennifer McKitrick received her Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1999. She has held academic positions at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she is currently Professor of Philosophy and the department chair. She synthesized her years of research on the metaphysics of powers in her 2018 book, Dispositional Pluralism (Oxford University Press).
Sarah Pessin is Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at the University of Denver. She is the author of Ibn Gabirol’s Theology of Desire (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and co- editor for Medieval Philosophy: A Multicultural Reader (Bloomsbury, 2019), with contributions to Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy, Routledge Companion to Islamic
Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy.
Clinton Tolley is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of numerous essays on Kant, Hegel, and the history of modern philosophy. He is also the co-editor and co-translator (with Sandra Lapointe) of The New Anti-Kant (Palgrave, 2014).
Powers
oxford philosophical concepts
Introduction
Julia Jorati
j
Why does a wine glass break when you drop it, whereas a steel goblet does not? The answer may seem obvious: glass, unlike steel, is fragile. This is an explanation in terms of a power or disposition: the glass breaks because it possesses a particular power or disposition, namely fragility. But how good an explanation is this? Some philosophers view it as incomplete, or even as entirely uninformative. After all, saying that something is fragile might merely mean that it breaks easily, or that it is disposed to break. This, in turn, might simply mean that the object is such that it will break under certain conditions—for instance when dropped from a certain height. If that is correct, saying that the glass is fragile does not genuinely explain why it breaks; “fragility” is merely a way of redescribing the fact about the glass that we are trying to explain, namely that it breaks when dropped.
According to a crude narrative, the history of powers explanations is one of initial flourishing and then a rapid and fatal decline. While ancient and medieval philosophy relied heavily and naïvely on the concept of powers, early modern philosophers recognized the problematic nature of this concept and, after some initial difficulties, managed to banish powers from philosophy for good. David Hume is often credited with dealing the death blow to powers, though we can find criticisms of powers much earlier. For instance, Thomas Hobbes mocks powers explanations in his 1651 book Leviathan; he claims that explaining the sinking of a heavy object through “an endeavour to be below” is tantamount to saying “that bodies descend or ascend because they do” (ch. 46, §24). In other words, it is completely vacuous to explain phenomena such as heaviness in terms of powers.
This crude narrative is, however, mistaken in several ways. Ancient and medieval accounts of powers are far more sophisticated than Hobbes and other critics allow. Moreover, powers are neither uniformly spurned in the early modern period nor universally and uncritically embraced in ancient and medieval philosophy. And they have certainly not been banished from philosophy—quite to the contrary, they are currently experiencing a revival of sorts in analytic metaphysics. Hence, the history of powers is much more convoluted than the crude narrative suggests. It is marked by a fluctuation in the popularity of realism about powers, with repeated cycles of waxing and waning. In some time periods or some cultural contexts, philosophers are intent on banishing powers; in other periods or other contexts, powers are widely embraced. Between these two extremes, we find transitional periods or contexts in which powers are defended by some and attacked by others. The history of powers is a turbulent one, and it is far from over.
This volume aims to tell parts of the history of philosophical theorizing about powers. It focuses on what we might call the metaphysical sense of “powers”—that is, the powers that are invoked in the explanation of natural changes and activities. It is not about powers in the
socio-political sense. Examples of metaphysical powers include the power of fire to burn wood, the power of wood to catch fire, the power of a seed to grow into a plant, and the power of a moving body to move another body.
In the history of philosophy, many different terms are used to refer to metaphysical powers. English terms1 include “ability,” “disposition,” “potency,” “faculty,” “capability,” “tendency,” “potentiality,” “proclivity,” and “capacity.” What unifies these different terms and the many different ways of understanding the nature of powers is the philosophical work that the corresponding entities are supposed to do. One central task is explaining why a thing changes in the ways that it does, rather than in other ways. Powers are supposed to provide at least partial answers to questions like the following: Why does the acorn turn into an oak tree? And why does it not turn into a sunflower instead? Why does the piece of paper catch fire when you place it near a flame? And why does the piece of glass not catch fire when you place it near the flame? Generally speaking, powers are supposed to explain the changes that a thing undergoes or produces in particular circumstances.
There are also a few other, related roles that powers are sometimes invoked to play. One of these roles is explaining or grounding modal properties. In other words, powers can help explain what is possible and what is not possible. According to some philosophers, for instance, the powers of a human body explain why it is possible for this human being to swim or run, but not fly. Moreover, powers are often used to distinguish different kinds or species of things. For instance, plants differ from nonliving matter by having the power to reproduce and grow; human beings differ from lower animals by having the power to reason and use language. Finally, some philosophers invoke powers to explain what it means to exist or be real: something exists if and only if it has at least one power.
1 Other languages often employ counterparts of these terms; in fact, many of these English words are derived from Latin or French terms.
The history of philosophy brims with controversies surrounding the concept of power. These controversies often turn on questions like the following: Are powers real entities or are they fictional? If they are real, what precisely is their ontological status? Are powers fundamental entities or are they reducible to something else? If they are reducible, to what are they reducible and how does this reduction work? And if powers are either not real or not fundamental, what is it that ultimately explains natural change and modal properties? Moreover, are there active and passive powers, and if so, what does that distinction amount to? What kinds of things possess active powers, and what active powers do they possess? How illuminating are explanations of natural changes in terms of powers? And finally, how do powers relate to modal properties— do powers ground modal properties, or vice versa? These controversies have not gone away; in many ways, their importance is undiminished. Hence, telling the history of philosophical theories of powers means exploring the trajectory of a concept whose relevance to the past and present of philosophy can hardly be overstated.
Disputes over the status and nature of powers are often at the heart of broader philosophical controversies. To name one prominent example, powers were at the epicenter of one of the most important philosophical debates in the early modern period: the debate over the metaphysical underpinnings of the natural sciences. Many champions of the mechanistic philosophy saw it as their mission to banish from their theories of nature what they viewed as occult entities such as powers, final causes, and substantial forms. Instead, they aimed to explain natural changes and divide material things into species or kinds merely on the basis of the categorical (or nondispositional), mechanistic properties of matter such as size, shape, and motion. One of the major challenges for these mechanistic philosophers was finding something to fill the gap left by the eradication of real powers. Some sought to reduce powers to categorical properties of matter; others completely eliminated powers from the natural world and placed them exclusively
in God.2 Interestingly, not all early modern authors were willing to banish powers from their fundamental ontology: some endeavored to accommodate real, irreducible powers within a broadly mechanistic framework, whereas others rejected mechanism in their quest for an adequate account of powers.
Each of the eleven chapters of the volume explores one of the many twists and turns in the history of powers. The first two chapters present the extremely varied ways in which ancient philosophers discussed powers. Echoes of these ancient theories are present in many medieval debates about powers, as we will see in chapters 3–5, as well as in early modern and modern debates, which are the topic of chapters 6–10. Indeed, as the last chapter illustrates, these echoes are even clear in contemporary theories of powers.
Let me say a bit about each of the chapters. In chapter 1, which is titled “Causal Powers in Aristotle and His Predecessors,” Anna Marmodoro presents Aristotle’s account of powers and contrasts it with the theories advanced by Anaxagoras and Plato. She argues that the way we typically think about powers today is deeply indebted to Aristotle, and very different from the way that philosophers before Aristotle conceptualized powers. For instance, the distinction between unactualized or merely potential powers on the one hand, and activated powers on the other hand, was an Aristotelian innovation. Pre-Aristotelian philosophers like Anaxagoras and Plato understood powers in completely different ways.
In the second chapter, D. T. J. Bailey investigates some of the idiosyncrasies of Plato’s theory of powers, as well as the main similarities between Plato’s conception of powers and that of early Stoic philosophers. Plato’s discussion of powers focuses mainly on skills, and he distinguishes skills from mere possibilities by arguing that skills are always two-way powers, that is, powers to accomplish opposites. Bailey
2 Malebranche is a good example of this strategy, as McDonough argues in chapter 6.
also examines the intriguing claim from Plato’s Sophist that the possession of powers is a criterion for being. Finally, Bailey argues that Plato’s claims about powers are quite similar to those of the early Stoics. For instance, both find it important to distinguish powers from other kinds of properties and both tend to be realists about powers. Moreover, both consider the possibility that powers might be more fundamental than other, non-dispositional properties, but in the end, they each have good reasons to reject such a fundamentality.
Sarah Pessin then examines medieval Platonist conceptions of powers in chapter 3, which is titled “Emanationist Powers: Plotinus, Theology of Aristotle, and Ibn Gabirol.” Emanationism is a metaphysical doctrine that was influenced by Plato and other Greek philosophers. According to this doctrine, divine reality emanates or overflows, which results in lower levels of reality that contain increasingly limited shares of divine goodness. In this picture, powers play an important role and are also hierarchically ordered: spiritual powers are the higher ones, whereas natural powers are lower and can be viewed as the afterlives of spiritual powers. The three traditions that Pessin examines— Greek, Islamic, and Jewish emanationism, as exemplified by Plotinus, the Theology of Aristotle, and Ibn Gabirol—understand the relation between spiritual and natural powers in interestingly different ways.
Chapter 4, by Jon McGinnis, is titled “The Power of Possibility: Power, Nature, and Possibility in Avicenna.” As the title suggests, McGinnis explores the metaphysical views of Avicenna, the medieval Islamic philosopher. One particularly important feature of Avicenna’s understanding of powers is his claim that our epistemic access to powers is quite limited. Using empirical methods, we can often know what powers something has, but we cannot know how these powers operate, that is, why the thing does what it does. Yet, Avicenna insists, this limited understanding is sufficient for scientific investigations.
Next, in chapter 5, Peter King examines various strands of medieval discussions about powers in the Christian West. One strand views powers as closely connected to modality. This approach—which King
calls the “modal approach”—is adopted by Abelard and Grosseteste. Another strand, in contrast, views powers as closely tied to agency— that is, they adopt what King calls the “agential approach.” Authors who develop this approach include Anselm of Canterbury and Henry of Ghent. John Duns Scotus advances the medieval debate significantly by providing a sophisticated account that solves many of the problems that vexed his predecessors. Interestingly, medieval philosophers after Scotus are much less interested in powers, in part because they are skeptical about our epistemic access to causal powers.
The sixth chapter then takes us into the early modern period: Jeffrey McDonough explores “Causal Powers and Ontology in Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz.” This chapter illustrates how enormously controversial the ontology of causal powers is in early modern philosophy. To simplify somewhat, Descartes criticizes the most prominent Scholastic accounts of powers but maintains that created things possess causal powers of some kind. Malebranche, in contrast, claims that there are no causal powers within the created world whatsoever. Finally, Leibniz accuses Malebranche and Descartes of having gone too far. His system aims to revive and modernize some Scholastic doctrines about powers that other early modern authors had spurned as outdated.
In chapter 7, Marcy P. Lascano investigates Cavendish’s materialist theory of the natural world, in which one particular power plays a pivotal role: the power of matter to self-move. This power is without question one of the most intriguing aspects of Cavendish’s system and it puts her in stark contrast with philosophers like Hobbes and Descartes, for whom matter is inert and lacks all active power. Lascano explains not only what self-motion is, but also why Cavendish believes that matter is self-moving and how exactly self-motion occurs. She also discusses the closely related notions of perception, causation, and motion.
Chapter 8 contains yet more examples of early modern philosophers who embrace powers. In this chapter, Sarah Hutton presents the roles of so-called plastic powers and the power of sympathy in Cambridge
Platonism, and more specifically, in the systems of Cudworth and More. These two authors contend that life, as well as the order and harmony of the natural world, is explained by teleological, formative, vital powers. They furthermore argue that these powers are only found in immaterial substances—that is, in spirits or souls. Building on earlier Platonists, they understand these immaterial substances as hierarchically ordered emanations of the divine and hence as conduits of God’s power in the natural world.
In the next chapter—chapter 9—Antonia LoLordo explores a particularly tempestuous segment of the history of powers: the debates over powers in Britain between the late 17th and the early 19th century. One very prominent question in this tradition is whether we even possess an idea of powers, and if so, what its content and origin is. Yet, these British philosophers are also interested in more metaphysical questions about the scope and ontological status of powers. LoLordo explores the very different ways in which Locke, Hume, Reid, and Shepherd answer these questions. She also shows that the decline of powers in this tradition is very short-lived: despite Hume’s enormously influential arguments that we do not have an idea of powers, his successors Reid and Shepherd resurrect the concept.
In the tenth chapter—“The Metaphysics of Powers in Kant and Hegel”— Clinton Tolley investigates the role that metaphysical powers play in German idealism. On some interpretations, idealists claim that only ideas or appearances exist. If that is correct, idealist theories may seem to have no room for any genuine powers. Yet, Tolley argues that this interpretation is mistaken: both Kant and Hegel—just like their idealist predecessors Berkeley and Leibniz—acknowledge the real existence of powers, over and above the ideas of powers. Human minds, souls, bodies, and God possess powers that are distinct from ideas of those powers. Moreover, Tolley explores the sense in which ideas themselves have powers or are effective in Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophical systems.
Finally, in chapter 11, Jennifer McKitrick provides an overview of recent debates about powers in analytic philosophy. One central question in this tradition is whether it is possible to eliminate statements about powers or dispositions in favor of conditional statements about the conditions in which these powers or dispositions manifest. Because of various problems with this type of conditional analysis, some authors argue that certain powers are irreducible; others attempt to devise more sophisticated conditional analyses that avoid these problems. McKitrick explores these issues by concentrating on four authors: Martin, Lewis, Armstrong, and Molnar.
In addition to the eleven main chapters, there are four short, interdisciplinary Reflections that explore powers from non-philosophical perspectives. The first Reflection, by Andrew Hicks, describes the ways in which many ancient and medieval thinkers view the rules governing musical harmony as helpful for understanding the proper relations among elemental powers, psychological powers, and even among the mind and body. In the second Reflection, Monika Brodnicka examines the role of powers or forces in West African religions, or more specifically, in Fulani and Bamana religious metaphysics. Next, Mi Gyung Kim reflects on the varying attitudes toward material powers in the history of chemistry and alchemy between the 16th and 19th centuries. In the last Reflection, Andrew R. Casper examines the powers that were often attributed to religious images in the late medieval and early modern periods—for example, the power to heal the sick and the power to induce mystical visions.
Chapter 1
Causal Powers in Aristotle and His Predecessors
Anna Marmodoro
1.1. Introduction
Causal powers are (types of) properties defined by the (type of) change they enable their possessor to suffer or bring about. They may exist as inactive, or as actively exercising. When exercising, they change the causal profile of the world, either by changing intransitively (e.g. when uranium decays), or by changing something else (when a magnet attracts metal), or both (when an ice cube cools down a lemonade).1
1 The reader might find it helpful to pursue further readings on contemporary accounts of causal powers; the literature is vast and includes George Molnar, Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, ed. Stephen Mumford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Stephen Mumford, Dispositions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Alexander Bird, Nature’s Metaphysics: Laws and Properties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Charles B. Martin, The Mind in Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Anna Marmodoro, ed., The Metaphysics of Powers: Their Grounding and Their Manifestations (New York: Routledge, 2010); Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For present
This way of thinking about causal powers, which is so familiar to us,2 was not however the way pre-Aristotelians thought; it is rather a theoretical acquisition that we owe to Aristotle. In ancient Greek thought before Aristotle, and under Parmenides’ veto against change,3 causal powers were thought to make a difference to the causal profile of the world without interaction and without becoming activated themselves—there was no distinction between powers in potentiality and activated powers. Further, causal powers were implicitly assumed to be change-makers in the world in two ways: (i) by making a difference to their bearers, changing them constitutionally by their presence in them; and (ii) by making ipso facto a qualitative difference in the environment too, with no mechanism of interaction with it. Anaxagoras and Plato (notwithstanding their differences)4 are representatives of this way of thinking about causal powers in antiquity.
Aristotle is the first in the history of metaphysics to distinguish a constitutional and an operational role of a power and derive them from the power’s ontology. He distinguishes between two states of a power: in potentiality and in actuality. A power makes a constitutional and qualitative difference to its bearer, whether it is in potentiality or in actuality; but it is only when in actuality, namely in the activated mode, that a power is operationally efficacious in the environment. Powers, according to Aristotle, are activated by interacting with their partner powers, operating on them and changing them. (One of his examples
purposes I do not draw any distinction between powers and dispositions; some metaphysicians do, e.g., Alexander Bird, “Limitations of Power,” in Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism, ed. Ruth Groff and John Greco (New York: Routledge, 2013), 25–47.
2 See Jennifer McKitrick’s chapter in this volume.
3 I use the expression “Parmenides’ veto against change” as a shorthand for a philosophical position about change whose formulation is by and large (but I reckon, not un-controversially; see, e.g., John Palmer, Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]) attributed to the historical Parmenides. According to this position, there is no creation ex nihilo (or destruction); no emergence of substances or qualities; and no qualitative alteration over time of what there is.
4 Among such differences there is the important one, that Plato “elevates” powers to a transcendent status, positing them as Forms; while Anaxagoras’s opposites are physical powers.
