RE: Thomism: Then & Now
October 15, 2021 at 2:11 pm
(This post was last modified: October 15, 2021 at 2:40 pm by emjay.)
(October 15, 2021 at 12:54 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: If we're tracking things all the way down the rabbit hole to fundamental forces or particles...and the buck stops there, it would seem we have a plurality of final causes. Is there any reason other than insistence that cause beyond that, one more layer down, is a set of one?
Just to be clear, are you envisioning a linear or parallel set of, let's call it 'pre-fundamental', causes? I'm guessing you'd mean the latter because it doesn't look like the former would add anything to the question, just shift the first cause back a few steps. If you do mean the latter, ie parallel, causes then that looks like it would tie in with something else I was curious about... whether elements in an essentially ordered series have to be a strictly linear one item per element set, or whether it could be more hierarchical than that, with one or many dependencies at any particular level. ETA: Nevermind; on reflection I think it's self-evident it would be hierarchical like that most of the time... if something was made of two materials for instance, where neither was dependent on the other, but both equally dependent on the next element.