Eh. That's not the problem. The problem with philosophical theism is that are they actually talking about Yahwe? Consider the doctrine of divine simplicity, that god does not contain of parts and does not change. Does not get angry over your sins and does not forgive as those are changes. Is that really Yahwe?
I don't *think* it does. It might make the third way pretty similar to the Leibnizian argument (since they both deal with contingent beings), but even then, it's not clear to me that they're identical. And of course, the first and second ways are totally different, since they begin with different data. (One might argue that the second way as I describe it is similar to Samuel Clarke's cosmological argument, since his is about dependent beings. But I'd have to do a more in-depth comparison.)
In any case, I'm more concerned with whether the arguments are sound than with whether they make Aquinas sufficiently different from Leibniz!
I agree with you that soundess is important, but I think the typology is relevant here, because if you've managed to avoid the issues that plague classical Thomistic arguments (existential inertia, quantifier shifts, gap problems, analogical language, etc) by subsumming the argument under a Leibnizian structure, then it seems that your new argumentative schema inherents all the problems that plague LCAs: defeaters to the PSR, Modal Collapse, Naturalistic PSRs, Infinite Explanatory Chains/Hume-Edwards Arguments, Problems with Necessary Existence, Naturalistic foundations of reality, etc.
I don't think all of those problems will carry over to the aggregative five ways. The modal collapse objection doesn't get off the ground, since the relevant causal principle is different. This also means that one can accept the aggregative causal principle even if one denies the more general PSR.
It's also going to be very hard to come up with a naturalistically acceptable candidate for the first way's unchanged changer. Ditto for the second way's uncaused cause, at least if we take that argument as being about essence-existence composites.
People who are sympathetic to the HEP might just deny the aggregative causal principle. But I'm not too worried about that: the HEP is very implausible when applied to causal explanation (Oberle's defenses of it only apply to grounding explanation, as far as I can tell).
I think modal collapse issues are still going to be in play; especially if we take Sobel's arguments that any contrastive or contingent fact is still going to lead to bruteness and it's going to be unclear how Theism can provide a superior explanation on this front.
I lean towards Aristotelianism, so I would just ground the relevant datum in the powers, dispositions, and effects of natural objects. See Jason Beyer's brief discussion of this on the section on teleological arguments in his "Comparison of Judeo-Christian Theism and Philosophical Naturalism as Explanatory Worldviews".
I point you here to the excellent work of Sebastian Montesinos who discusses causal defenses of the HEP and offers some good responses to Pruss's Cannonball argument.
I don't see how the causal principles employed in the aggregative five ways could possibly lead to modal collapse. Why would the plurality of all changes having a cause entail that everything is necessary? The argument for modal collapse (as given by people like van Inwagen) requires a strong PSR, which Thomists need not accept (Ed Feser's Five Proofs book actually has a useful discussion of this issue; his response is just to deny the relevant version of the PSR, since he doesn't need it for his arguments).
I'm also an Aristotelian (and, of course, so was St. Thomas). But I don't see how that's relevant to the aggregative five ways: there's nothing about Aristotelianism which implies that contingent beings don't need causes, or that the aggregative causal principle is false. Indeed, it's precisely because of his Aristotelianism that Aquinas believes that all changes need a cause (since every change is the actualization of a potentiality).
It isn't clear to me how Montesinos' defense of the HEP is meant to make trouble for the aggregative causal principle (ACP) His most important argument is that Pruss' "big conjunctive fact" is nothing over and above the individual facts which make it up. But this is consistent with the ACP: the whole point of plural reference is that it *doesn't* require us to say that the members of the plurality make up one single conjunction (Koons makes this point explicitly in his rendition of the argument). The ACP just says that if every member of the plurality has a cause, then there is a joint cause for the whole plurality (i.e. something outside of the plurality which is causally prior to every member of the plurality).
Montesinos also tries to draw distinctions between different notions of explanation, which we supposedly employ in scientific vs. everyday contexts. But this strikes me as very weak: there are good, principled reasons to expect all of the data in the five ways to have causal explanations (both individually and plurally), and given Aristotelianism, we have a pretty good grasp on what it is we're asking for. There's no ambiguity here, of the sort which Montesinos wants to appeal to. It's not like Aquinas only wanted to causally explain change because he was illicitly importing his everyday notion of explanation into a scientific context; rather, he had good *philosophical* grounds for thinking that there had to be a cause!
The ACP is using plural reference: in addition to individual facts/substances/events, we can also refer to pluralities of facts/substances/events, and ask for explanations of those pluralities. The papers by Koons and Pruss in the second footnote will likely be of some assistance here. See also the SEP article on plural quantification: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plural-quant/
This nicely gets to the core of the arguments, as well as the heart of my worries. I am quite convinced that (at least most of) the aggregates mentioned above are subject to set-theoretical paradoxes and I don’t know if this can be resolved by plural quantification. I would love to be able to endorse these arguments though
Why do you think the relevant aggregates are subject to set-theoretic paradoxes? As long as we're careful to ensure that the pluralities themselves don't meet their own membership criteria, I think we should be fine. And the pluralities here clearly don't: the plurality of all actualizations-of-potency is not an actualization of potency, the plurality of all caused substances is not a caused substance, and the plurality of all contingent substances is not a contingent substance! (I've rephrased some things in the post itself to make this clearer.)
It seems to me that in order for the principle(s) to be plausible, they would have to be about facts, not substances. It’s easy to move from each contingent fact has a cause to the total contingent fact has a cause since both are facts. Moving from substances needing causes to a non-substance needing a cause is more suspicious. But, if we keep it to facts, then the set of all contingent facts is formally equivalent to the set of all facts (as proven by Oppy and Tomaszewski), so that’s a no-go.
So, that’s the dilemma I find myself in. Either this is a principle about facts, in which case I think we will end up with a set of sets, or we do substances and the aggregation principle loses a lot of its plausibility.
I think even if you take the argument to be about facts, you can avoid the set-theoretic worries. The explananda of the arguments (on a fact-based reading) aren't big conjunctive facts or sets of facts: they're *pluralities* of facts, which don't run into the sorts of worries raised by Oppy and Tomaszewski. Now, you say you don't know if your worries can be resolved by plural quantification, but it seems very likely to me that they can. At least, we'd better *hope* that they can; after all, we want some way to talk about totality of all true propositions without saying that those true propositions comprise a set (which, as Grim showed, they don't).
Also, you can have some worries about plural quantification while still (at least tenatively) endorsing these arguments. Pruss and Rasmussen are two of the most notable advocates of these sorts of arguments, and they wrote a whole paper ("Problems with Plurals") about difficulties with plural quantification.
I meant that I am skeptical of plural quantification as a thing. I don’t doubt that plural quantification would solve the problem. I just don’t know if plural quantification itself should be accepted.
Ah, that clarifies things. I'm obviously sympathetic to plural quantification, but I understand how rejecting it would make one skeptical about these arguments. What makes you hesitant to accept plural quantification?
Plural quantification strikes me as too easy. The solutions seem too cheap. Other times, plural quantification just looks like higher-order logic by another name, and I have better reasons to reject higher-order logics. And, admittedly, I was never trained in plural systems, so they’re still foreign to me. If I actually took the time to learn the systems, I could become more open to them. That’s just a me problem.
Eh. That's not the problem. The problem with philosophical theism is that are they actually talking about Yahwe? Consider the doctrine of divine simplicity, that god does not contain of parts and does not change. Does not get angry over your sins and does not forgive as those are changes. Is that really Yahwe?
Doesn't this basically shift all the five ways into a Leibnizian-De-Ente style argument?
I don't *think* it does. It might make the third way pretty similar to the Leibnizian argument (since they both deal with contingent beings), but even then, it's not clear to me that they're identical. And of course, the first and second ways are totally different, since they begin with different data. (One might argue that the second way as I describe it is similar to Samuel Clarke's cosmological argument, since his is about dependent beings. But I'd have to do a more in-depth comparison.)
In any case, I'm more concerned with whether the arguments are sound than with whether they make Aquinas sufficiently different from Leibniz!
I agree with you that soundess is important, but I think the typology is relevant here, because if you've managed to avoid the issues that plague classical Thomistic arguments (existential inertia, quantifier shifts, gap problems, analogical language, etc) by subsumming the argument under a Leibnizian structure, then it seems that your new argumentative schema inherents all the problems that plague LCAs: defeaters to the PSR, Modal Collapse, Naturalistic PSRs, Infinite Explanatory Chains/Hume-Edwards Arguments, Problems with Necessary Existence, Naturalistic foundations of reality, etc.
I don't think all of those problems will carry over to the aggregative five ways. The modal collapse objection doesn't get off the ground, since the relevant causal principle is different. This also means that one can accept the aggregative causal principle even if one denies the more general PSR.
It's also going to be very hard to come up with a naturalistically acceptable candidate for the first way's unchanged changer. Ditto for the second way's uncaused cause, at least if we take that argument as being about essence-existence composites.
People who are sympathetic to the HEP might just deny the aggregative causal principle. But I'm not too worried about that: the HEP is very implausible when applied to causal explanation (Oberle's defenses of it only apply to grounding explanation, as far as I can tell).
I think modal collapse issues are still going to be in play; especially if we take Sobel's arguments that any contrastive or contingent fact is still going to lead to bruteness and it's going to be unclear how Theism can provide a superior explanation on this front.
I lean towards Aristotelianism, so I would just ground the relevant datum in the powers, dispositions, and effects of natural objects. See Jason Beyer's brief discussion of this on the section on teleological arguments in his "Comparison of Judeo-Christian Theism and Philosophical Naturalism as Explanatory Worldviews".
I point you here to the excellent work of Sebastian Montesinos who discusses causal defenses of the HEP and offers some good responses to Pruss's Cannonball argument.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKwtCxjF3HY
I don't see how the causal principles employed in the aggregative five ways could possibly lead to modal collapse. Why would the plurality of all changes having a cause entail that everything is necessary? The argument for modal collapse (as given by people like van Inwagen) requires a strong PSR, which Thomists need not accept (Ed Feser's Five Proofs book actually has a useful discussion of this issue; his response is just to deny the relevant version of the PSR, since he doesn't need it for his arguments).
I'm also an Aristotelian (and, of course, so was St. Thomas). But I don't see how that's relevant to the aggregative five ways: there's nothing about Aristotelianism which implies that contingent beings don't need causes, or that the aggregative causal principle is false. Indeed, it's precisely because of his Aristotelianism that Aquinas believes that all changes need a cause (since every change is the actualization of a potentiality).
It isn't clear to me how Montesinos' defense of the HEP is meant to make trouble for the aggregative causal principle (ACP) His most important argument is that Pruss' "big conjunctive fact" is nothing over and above the individual facts which make it up. But this is consistent with the ACP: the whole point of plural reference is that it *doesn't* require us to say that the members of the plurality make up one single conjunction (Koons makes this point explicitly in his rendition of the argument). The ACP just says that if every member of the plurality has a cause, then there is a joint cause for the whole plurality (i.e. something outside of the plurality which is causally prior to every member of the plurality).
Montesinos also tries to draw distinctions between different notions of explanation, which we supposedly employ in scientific vs. everyday contexts. But this strikes me as very weak: there are good, principled reasons to expect all of the data in the five ways to have causal explanations (both individually and plurally), and given Aristotelianism, we have a pretty good grasp on what it is we're asking for. There's no ambiguity here, of the sort which Montesinos wants to appeal to. It's not like Aquinas only wanted to causally explain change because he was illicitly importing his everyday notion of explanation into a scientific context; rather, he had good *philosophical* grounds for thinking that there had to be a cause!
Is the word plurality being used in some technical sense here? because I'm having trouble grokking what exactly the ACP involves
The ACP is using plural reference: in addition to individual facts/substances/events, we can also refer to pluralities of facts/substances/events, and ask for explanations of those pluralities. The papers by Koons and Pruss in the second footnote will likely be of some assistance here. See also the SEP article on plural quantification: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plural-quant/
Thank you!
This nicely gets to the core of the arguments, as well as the heart of my worries. I am quite convinced that (at least most of) the aggregates mentioned above are subject to set-theoretical paradoxes and I don’t know if this can be resolved by plural quantification. I would love to be able to endorse these arguments though
Why do you think the relevant aggregates are subject to set-theoretic paradoxes? As long as we're careful to ensure that the pluralities themselves don't meet their own membership criteria, I think we should be fine. And the pluralities here clearly don't: the plurality of all actualizations-of-potency is not an actualization of potency, the plurality of all caused substances is not a caused substance, and the plurality of all contingent substances is not a contingent substance! (I've rephrased some things in the post itself to make this clearer.)
It seems to me that in order for the principle(s) to be plausible, they would have to be about facts, not substances. It’s easy to move from each contingent fact has a cause to the total contingent fact has a cause since both are facts. Moving from substances needing causes to a non-substance needing a cause is more suspicious. But, if we keep it to facts, then the set of all contingent facts is formally equivalent to the set of all facts (as proven by Oppy and Tomaszewski), so that’s a no-go.
So, that’s the dilemma I find myself in. Either this is a principle about facts, in which case I think we will end up with a set of sets, or we do substances and the aggregation principle loses a lot of its plausibility.
I think even if you take the argument to be about facts, you can avoid the set-theoretic worries. The explananda of the arguments (on a fact-based reading) aren't big conjunctive facts or sets of facts: they're *pluralities* of facts, which don't run into the sorts of worries raised by Oppy and Tomaszewski. Now, you say you don't know if your worries can be resolved by plural quantification, but it seems very likely to me that they can. At least, we'd better *hope* that they can; after all, we want some way to talk about totality of all true propositions without saying that those true propositions comprise a set (which, as Grim showed, they don't).
Also, you can have some worries about plural quantification while still (at least tenatively) endorsing these arguments. Pruss and Rasmussen are two of the most notable advocates of these sorts of arguments, and they wrote a whole paper ("Problems with Plurals") about difficulties with plural quantification.
I meant that I am skeptical of plural quantification as a thing. I don’t doubt that plural quantification would solve the problem. I just don’t know if plural quantification itself should be accepted.
Ah, that clarifies things. I'm obviously sympathetic to plural quantification, but I understand how rejecting it would make one skeptical about these arguments. What makes you hesitant to accept plural quantification?
Plural quantification strikes me as too easy. The solutions seem too cheap. Other times, plural quantification just looks like higher-order logic by another name, and I have better reasons to reject higher-order logics. And, admittedly, I was never trained in plural systems, so they’re still foreign to me. If I actually took the time to learn the systems, I could become more open to them. That’s just a me problem.