I consider myself a Thomist critical realist. As a philosophy student many years ago, I was swept away by Aquinas’ metaphysics–even if it wasn’t exactly a popular thing to do so. But years later, I met Roy Bhaskar, and between me and his Critical Realism, it was love at first sight.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about these two philosophers, how a dialogue between their thoughts might be conducted–particularly, about causality. I’m preparing a course on Philosophy of Religion, and I’m mulling over the possibility of using critical realism as a dialogue partner of the philosophers of religion that we will discuss–among them, Thomas Aquinas.
As we know, Thomas basically subscribes to the Aristotelian notion of causality (although as in all ideas, he innovates it). I am referring to the so-called “Four Causes”: material, formal, efficient, and final. Modern science has, of course, focused almost exclusively on Efficient Cause and in some circles, has even tended to denigrate Final Cause and the whole idea of teleology.
Bhaskar, on the other hand, with his insight into the open-systemic world has clarified the distinction between causation and correlation by insisting that conditions are not–as we tend to think–causes. Bhaskar, of course, is referring to efficient causes when he talks about the underlying generative mechanisms that account for the way things tend to act in the open system.
So here are a couple of leads for me, a couple of questions that may be worth pursuing:
- For Thomas, it is precisely because of its Final Cause that the Efficient Cause is causally efficacious. Is there a way then to account for the notion of Final Cause in the critical realist concept of causality? For Bhaskar, generative mechanisms are determined by the structure of an entity or process, in a sense, Bhaskar’s concept of causality is also related to Aquinas’ Final Cause.
- When we think of Thomas’ (and Aristotle’s) idea of the First Cause (aka Prime Mover, Unmoved Mover, or God), could Bhaskar’s insight into the stratified nature of reality shed some light here? Hence, to go in search of this First Cause, instead of an infinite series of prior empirical causes, we dive deep into the levels of prior ontological causes in the Domain of the Real?
#unfinishedthoughts 🙂