Een dissertatie over de geschiedenis van het idee Causa sui
In 2012 had ik een reeks Blogs over het niet eenvoudige begrip
causa sui [cf. hier
een overzicht ervan]. N.a.v. het vorige blog ontdekte ik dat op internet een dissertatie
staat van Desislava Parashkevova, waarin zij een nóg uitgebreider historisch onderzoek
verrichtte, waarin zij terugging naar Plato, en een hoofdstuk 5 heeft over Leibniz’s
Monadic Self-Causation and Spinoza’s Self-Caused God-Substance [p. 135] - met daarbinnen de paragraaf “Spinoza’s
Self-Caused God-Substance and the Problem of Ideality for Its Finite Modes [p.
168]. Het lijkt me nuttig deze informatie hier in een blog door te geven.
Desislava Parashkevova, A
conceptual history of the idea of self-causation: from Plato's forms to Hegel's
concrete universal. 2015-09-29 [Cf.]
Summary
The dissertation is a historical-cum-conceptual examination
of the idea of self-causation (causa sui). In the Western metaphysical
tradition, self-causation has been understood in two ways: (i.) as an
individual existent’s spontaneous self-creation and internal causal or
ontological determination (what we term ontological self-causation), and/ or
(ii.) as an individual’s logical identity with an essence that uniquely
characterizes it and out of which all of its features issue (logical
self-causation). In sum, self-causation is (i.) the internal reason for an
individual’s existence, and/ or (ii) the internal reason for an individual’s
individuality.
The question whether there really are existents self-caused
in at least one of these two senses – and what precisely we can know or say
about them – has, in one form or another, occupied metaphysicians of all
historical epochs. Our aim is to distil the idea’s logical structure and
explanatory scope through philosophical engagement with a careful selection of
paradigmatic discourses in the history of metaphysics. These are: Plato’s
Theory of Forms, Aristotle’s theory of substance, John Duns Scotus’ and
Francisco Suárez’s theories of individuality, G. W. Leibniz’s monadological and
Baruch Spinoza’s monistic metaphysics, Immanuel Kant’s transcendental and G. W.
F. Hegel’s dialectical theory of individuality – inasmuch as they all contain,
presuppose, or prefigure, theories of self-causation.
A dialogical discussion of issues specific to each key
discourse reveals a shared problematic bound up with an individual’s being or
becoming (what it is) according to an internal principle, usually also in
relation to other individuals or within a general order of things. It emerges
that, after Aristotle’s step away from Plato’s transcendent Forms, the theory
of self-causation embeds itself in immanentist, particularistic metaphysics. We
argue that this theory finds its most complete articulation in Hegel’s metaphysics
of the concrete universal. The outcome of the theory is that an individual can
coherently be understood as self-caused only if it is fully identical with a
unique essence (logical self-causation) yet without bringing itself into being
(ontological self-causation). Self-causation is shown, accordingly, to be a
viable criterion for an individual’s logical identity qua individual. [cf.]
