3/6/2023 0 Comments Infinite regress of causesLearning to look at any topic philosophically requires, I think, jumping right in, even knowing that you might be making a fool of yourelf so that's what I do. Because I consider posts here to be 'literary seedings' rather than finished products, nothing here should be taken as if it were anything more than an attempt to rough out some basic thoughts on various issues. Nothing in this weblog is done rigorously: it's a forum to let my mind be unruly, a place for jottings and first impressions. I consider blogging to be a very informal type of publishing - like putting up thoughts on your door with a note asking for comments. It is the contradictoriness of certain regresses that causes the problem, not their infinity as such.įor a rough introduction to my philosophy of blogging, including the Code of Amiability I try to follow on this weblog, please read my fifth anniversary post. So when an infinite regress is the sort found in (1) or (2), we are forced to achieve state, i.e., we have to terminate the regress in some way, or we are caught in a contradiction. Aquinas occasionally does run refutations based on practical contradictions (most notably against the Averroist doctrine of the intellect), but they are very rare like all scholastics, Aquinas tends to look for logical reductio, not pragmatic retorsion. But (2)-type arguments yield logical contradictions. And, while there is in certain cases a link between the two types, they are different types of argument, since (1)-type arguments yield practical contradictions, i.e., they set up a contradiction between what you are trying to do (explain) and what you are putting forward in trying to do it (complete deferral of explanation). It seems likely that, given certain notions of explanation you can construct a sound (1)-type argument to go with any sound (2)-type argument involving any sort of dependence (which is what generates the contradiction in all the cases I have seen) but these are not the arguments Aquinas actually makes. Interestingly, this is not how Aquinas's arguments are usually explained they're usually explained as if they were (1)-type arguments. What Aquinas does is argue that in certain cases, e.g., a regress of movers, or a regress of efficient causes, positing an infinite such regress implies the existence of something both unmoved and moved, or both caused and uncaused. ![]() ![]() ![]() Aquinas does not appeal to the impossibility of infinite regress as such indeed, he is quite insistent that some infinite regresses are possible, which is a reason why he believes that we cannot demonstrate that the world had a finite past. Infinite regress becomes a problem in only two types of circumstances:ġ) The infinite regress arises in an attempt at explanation that involves the endless deferral of what actually explains the explanandum.Ģ) The infinite regress implies a contradiction given the nature of the regress.Īn example of (2) occurs in Aquinas's ways to God, some of which use the impossibility of certain kinds of infinite regresses to prove the existence of something that's the sort of thing human beings call 'God'. What's wrong with infinite regress as such? Nothing at all. The issue of infinite regress arguments came up in the comments to this post at "The Garden of Forking Paths" and since I was intending to do a post on infinite regress arguments in the next several days anyway, given that they'll play a role in some of my Points in the Why I Believe in Free Will series, it has stimulated me to post it now.
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