Conférence
Anna Marmodoro (Saint Louis University / Durham University)
Francisco Suárez’s Mereological Account of Causation
mercredi 25 juin 2025 – 17h-18h30 – Amphi Chasles (escalier E ou F, 3e étage) – Sorbonne

What is causation? What is it for one thing to cause an effect upon another thing? Most fundamentally, on any realist account of causation, a cause makes a difference to another thing’s being, changing its constitution, in terms of either essential or non-essential properties, according to how radical the change is. I argued in earlier work (2021, and also forthcoming in press) that there are two ways to take this conception of causation forward: one might think that a cause changes another thing’s being by adding (/subtracting) being to (/from) it, or by interacting with it. I showed that the former model of causation, by addition or subtraction of being, is historically the first and philosophically the mainstream one in Classical Antiquity. It is also an intuitive way of explaining causation, on account of a part-whole relation between the cause and what is causally affected by it; e.g. making coffee dilute is adding water to it, or making seawater drinkable is subtracting salt from it. The key feature of this model of causation is that qualitive change is reduced to quantitative change; change is addition or subtraction of being, namely of ‘components’ or ‘parts’ of a thing’s constitution: what is acted upon has more or less being because of the effect of the cause. I call this the Mereological Model of causation, and have shown it predominant before Aristotle, but also, after Aristotle (in the Stoics).
On the alternative causal model, something changes something else by interacting with it. I call this the Interactive Model. This is Aristotle’s account of causation, which we have inherited and still uphold today. For Aristotle, causation is the interaction (hence qualitative change) between causal powers. A typical example of Aristotle’s are mixtures, e.g., generating flesh, bone, or blood from the interaction between elemental powers – hot, cold, wet, and dry – which compromise each other’s nature, qualitatively, all the way to equilibrium between them. I argued that the Interactive Model was not the predominant conception of causation in antiquity; rather, for all his influence, Aristotle was an outlier on causation in the Classical philosophy. I have further argued that Aristotle does not supply a metaphysical explanation of interaction between causal powers, treating interaction as a primitive, rock-bottom idea in his system.
However, what happened in between Classical Antiquity and Modernity? Might the Mereological Model be so philosophically compelling and intuitively appealing that it did remain ‘the’ model of causation adopted, even by self-identifying Aristotelians, across the longue durée of the post-classical period?
I have identified as my key study case Francisco Suárez, an eminent scholastic philosopher and theologian of the 16th century, and commentator of Aristotle. If there was evidence in his work that he upheld the Mereological Model, this would attest to the philosophical appeal of the model, even for someone like Suárez, who is steeped in Aristotelian philosophy.
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OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
parimed (27 mai 2025). 25 juin 2025 – Conférence – A. Marmodoro : “Francisco Suárez’s Mereological Account of Causation” Pariscope médiéval. Consulté le 7 décembre 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/140nu
