Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Bodies as Privative Causes: Descartes on the Causes of Motion

Tinio, Jerilyn Pia
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1546273381407833

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Philosophy.
Descartes famously reduces the diversity and change we observe in material bodies to the diversity and change in the movements of their parts. Thus, for Descartes, a causal account of diversity and change in the natural world is given by a causal account of the motions of bodies. Given Descartes’s reduction of matter to mere extension, several readers of Descartes, such as Daniel Garber (1992, 1993) and Walter Ott (2009), have argued that God’s immediate activity on bodies must exhaust this type of causal account. This reading of Descartes on the causes of motion, however, is challenged by the difficulty of understanding how the simple and unchanging nature of God’s action could directly produce a material world in constant flux. Other readers, such as Helen Hattab (2000) and Tad Schmaltz (2008, 2015), have argued that while God is directly responsible for matter in motion in general, given God’s immutability Descartes must have treated other entities besides God as genuine causes of the continuously changing and various states of bodies. These readings, however, give rise to a number of problems, including explaining how these causal entities might fit into Descartes’s austere, substance-mode ontology. In this dissertation, I propose an alternative interpretation of Descartes on the causes of motion that draws from the strengths of these two general types of readings while avoiding the difficulties they face. I argue in defense of the claim, in line with readers like Hattab and Schmaltz, that Descartes must recognize causes besides God in accounting for the diversity and change in the motions of bodies. Moreover, I maintain with readers like Garber and Ott that, for Descartes, God must be the only genuine efficient cause of these motions. I contend, however, that despite God’s having this status, there is still room for bodies and their modes in a causal account of natural change. To understand how Cartesian bodies could have a causal influence in the world of matter, I propose we see these bodies, not as efficient causes of the states of other bodies, but as, what I call, `privative’ causes of these states. I defend this claim by elaborating upon a well-known analogy Descartes draws between evil action and curved motion in an early work, his Treatise on Light (1632). On the reading I develop, God is the sole active and efficient cause of the material reality of motion in bodies, as well as any other positive states they might possess. But Cartesian bodies can effect change in the material world by depriving other bodies of these states upon impact and, in doing so, serve as causes that do not produce but merely determine the motion that God creates and continuously conserves in matter in general.
Lisa Downing (Advisor)
Julia Jorati (Advisor)
Tamar Rudavsky (Committee Member)
Lisa Shabel (Committee Member)
159 p.
Philosophy
Descartes and causation, body-body interaction, Cartesian physics, powers in Cartesian bodies, bodies as causes, Descartes and occasionalism

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Tinio, J. P. (2019). Bodies as Privative Causes: Descartes on the Causes of Motion [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1546273381407833

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Tinio, Jerilyn. Bodies as Privative Causes: Descartes on the Causes of Motion. 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1546273381407833.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Tinio, Jerilyn. "Bodies as Privative Causes: Descartes on the Causes of Motion." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1546273381407833

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1546273381407833
377
© 2019, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.