Sentences with phrase «efficient cause in»

There are several valuable constructive functions of efficient cause in the cosmological scheme of Whitehead.

But series of efficient causes in space or time are unintelligible; one never arrives at a final answer explaining the origin and goal of motion.

Not exact matches

Credit is growing more slowly than it has in the past but not because the financial system has become more efficient but simply because debt levels have become too high, causing regulators to force down the growth in credit without seriously improving the efficiency of the financial sector.

For Whitehead too, God is creator in the sense of efficient cause.

If the Darwinist, taking up Descartes» and Bacon's project of understanding nature according only to material and efficient causes, studies the history of living things and says that he can see no organizing, active principles of whole living substances (formal causes) and no real plan, purpose or design in living things (final causes), then I accept his report without surprise.

In either case the mind is faced with a conundrum: an endless regress without possibility of finding a First Efficient Cause, or ultimate reason, on the one hand, or an absolutebeginning without necessity, on the other.

He explained his belief in God by using the basic argument from contingency which postulates an Efficient Cause.

Just as every entity requires an explanation of its being in terms of an efficient cause of being (the second argument), so also it requires an explanation in terms of final cause or purpose.

In the particularly difficult question of global warming, thus far most economists have argued that it will be more efficient to respond to the problems caused by global warming as they occur than to make serious efforts to reduce it, since these efforts would slow economic growth.

Christianity, for its part, is not so much a new thing as a prolonged episode within the greater history of nihilism, notable chiefly for having brought part of this history's logic to its consummation by having invented the metaphysical God, the form of all forms, who grounds all of being in himself as absolute efficient cause, and who personifies that cause as total power and will.

In what sense are the past occasions efficient causes of the new, particular occasion?

Of immediate interest is the fact that the eighteenth Category of Explanation can also be termed the «principle of efficient, and final, causation;» for elsewhere Whitehead tells us that the» «objectifications» of the actual entities in the actual world, relative to a definite actual entity, constitute the efficient causes out of which that actual entity arises; the «subjective aim» at «satisfaction» constitutes the final cause, or lure, whereby there is determinate concrescence» (PR 134).

However, since they condition it through their immanence in it, this second sense of efficient causation presupposes the first — namely, that the past occasions are efficient causes of the new occasion because, as data, they are included in, and hence are constituents of, it.

In reality, they assumed, a deeper analysis of organisms shows that their behavior is also explained by efficient causes operating among their parts or on them from without.

The account of the creation of Adam and Eve seemed to affirm such a direct and exclusively creative intervention of God that in addition to God as efficient cause, only inorganic matter could have any place as material cause therein.

Or is anything in nature that seems to act as an efficient cause only carrying out the causality of God, with no agency of its own?

Whereas science deals mainly in efficient and material causes, religion deals mainly with formal and final causes.

In reality it can find only material and formal, or instrumental, causes, but in its ignorance it imagines that it has found efficient and final causeIn reality it can find only material and formal, or instrumental, causes, but in its ignorance it imagines that it has found efficient and final causein its ignorance it imagines that it has found efficient and final causes.

The reason for this seeming transmutation of evil into good in another - worldly consequent God lies in the fact that Whitehead has not really developed the idea of God as efficient cause.

Physics has had enormous success in explaining why things happen as they do in the natural world, but its modes of explanation do not fit neatly into the four-fold classification of material, formal, efficient, and final causes.

Efficient cause remains with us in the theory of agency, energy, motion.

As is well known, Aristotle agrees that some natural processes have final as well as material and efficient causes, but the events in a person's life are not goal - directed merely because they achieve some result that might have been their goal: rain may spoil the crops on the threshing floor, but that was not necessarily the goal of the rain.

It does not belong to the «essence» of the finite efficient cause and is not an intrinsic constitutive factor of its «nature», but, while transcending this nature, belongs to it precisely as its ground in relation to it as agent and cause.

It can not be objected to this, that the finite efficient cause produces its effect in the potentia of another (the materia from which it educes the form), so that it does not itself become more than it was.

Although serious scientific work was done in terms of Aristotle's metaphysics, especially in biology, the ready appeal to final causes in explaining physical phenomena blocked needed inquiry into efficient causes.

Given the character of scientific explanation in terms of efficient causes, it is quite understandable that such evolutionary advance should be explained in terms of natural selection and chance variation as the best possible scientific theory.

In that tradition, instead of thinking of God as a persuasive power who acts as a kind of lure toward which things move, which was Aristotle's conception, Aquinas and others adopted the understanding that God creates by being the ultimate efficient cause for the world.

Classically, God's power is seen in terms of omnipotence, and God is creator as the sole primary efficient cause of the world.

This ideal is what it receives from God, and it achieves its own actualization by the way in which it fuses together all of its efficient causes by means of this ideal of itself.

In any case, panexperientialism accepts the assumption, which lies behind the scientific search for explanations in terms of efficient causes, that d events are causally conditioned by antecedent eventIn any case, panexperientialism accepts the assumption, which lies behind the scientific search for explanations in terms of efficient causes, that d events are causally conditioned by antecedent eventin terms of efficient causes, that d events are causally conditioned by antecedent events.

Modern science does not point to a reductive approach to nature, limited to material and efficient causes, but to a more holistic picture, in which science itself is seamlessly connected with the purpose of the universe, its plan and direction.

In another sense a thing may be necessary from some cause quite apart from itself; and should this be either an efficient or a moving cause then it brings about the necessity of compulsion... It was not necessary, then, for Christ to sufferfrom necessity of compulsion, either on God's part, who ruled that Christ should suffer, or on Christ's own part, who suffered voluntarily.

And prime matter requires an efficient cause only if it came into being at some point in time or if it lacks in itself the power to sustain its own being.

While I hesitate to identify the biblical Creator - God simply with efficient, formal or final cause of the universe, I do think that there is some validity in employing the category of causation analogously when we try to express the way in which God influences nature.

Second, the reproduction of the past in the present through efficient cause is an important element in the regularities described in laws which are so important for science, technology, methodology, scholarship, and speculation (AI 139).

The efficient causes, detailing precisely how nature works, are needed to «get a spacecraft to Mars or explain how the laser in the grocery store checkout line works.»

Fourth, occasional intervention with coercive efficient causation to counteract excess evil is not as equitable to all occasions in the world as the constant intervention in every occasion with final cause tending to overcome evil.

Some of the data of efficient cause may be eliminated (PR 248) and some of the potentiality in the initial ideal aim may be eliminated (PR 342).

In other words, the past actual entities, precisely» as included in the new actual entity; are the efficient causes of the initial set of characteristics of the new entitIn other words, the past actual entities, precisely» as included in the new actual entity; are the efficient causes of the initial set of characteristics of the new entitin the new actual entity; are the efficient causes of the initial set of characteristics of the new entity.

For the categories to be illustrated with each new divine feeling, there must obviously be those efficient causes (or there must have been others in place of them) to provide the content for the new creative synthesis; that all preceding efficient causes, divine and subdivine, will always have been required to provide that content will be argued below.

Whitehead contrasts «deterministic efficient causation» with persuasive spontaneity that occurs in final cause (PR 374, cf. 75).

Human introspection is hardly capable of identifying all the efficient causes of a past feeling, let alone weighing the power of each relative to each other and to that feeling's final causality; God in turn would seem to have no impartial information or standards by which to conduct such comparative weighings with perfect precision.

This is Whitehead's explanation of the capacity of past actual entities to continue to «function» as efficient causes (that is, as causing the appearance of certain characteristics in the transcendent future).

If the only possible efficient or final causes are fully concrete units of reality — that is, feelings — then the most abstract of abstractions — that is, the categories — can not be causes in either sense.

If the many past actual entities are dominated, for example, by anger, then those past entities become the efficient causes of the appearance of anger in the new actual entity.

It is this stubborn factuality that makes it possible for these past entities to be included in the future actual entities and, thereby, for these past actual entities to function as efficient causes of certain aspects of those future actual entities.

Insofar as the given entities thus function as efficacious causes, prehension is identical with the process of efficient causality described by [249] Aristotle — in Scholastic terms, with moveri ab alio.

The remainder of this section will defend the interpretation that: 1) strictly speaking, the categories are neither causes nor effects in terms of either efficient or final causality as those modes of causality are manifested by the concrete; 2) nevertheless, there is a sense in which the categories always require a current divine final cause; 3) furthermore, there is a sense in which the categories always require all previous divine (and subdivine) efficient causes (and hence all previous final causes); 4) finally, there is a sense in which the categories always constitute what may be termed «quasi-efficient causes» and «quasi-efficient effects.»

Finally, it is unclear how salient an efficient cause must have been and how decisively a new feeling must conform to that cause in order for us to say in a precise and nonarbitrary way that an emergent habit has been manifested under «pertinent conditions.»

They are the efficient causes explaining why the new occasions embody the characteristics they do in fact have.