Causal Possibility and Necessity in Aristotle's Philosophy and its Relationship with Democritean Mechanical Necessity

Document Type : Original Research

Author
S.Amir.A. Mousavian
Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
10.58209/jpt.3.4.309
Abstract
The aporia of causal necessity can be defined by looking at the dilemma of (1) the permanent, logical, and metaphysical concomitance of necessity and causation, or (2) the negation of one without the negation of the other, and in fact, the denial of the permanent concomitance of necessity and causation. This Aristotelian doctrine that everything has a cause cannot necessarily be a logical and philosophical result of determinism, the negation of the possibility of the future, and the collapse of potentiality into actuality. Necessity is the description of the causality that occurred in the context of the current reality of the present and the past, not the causality that occurs in the future. It is possible not to consider this meaning of necessity as requiring determinism and the principle of causality. In fact, the operator and the logical and metaphysical modality of causality is the actual reality of necessity, which is not always coextensive with determinism. By ignoring the final cause, Democritus reduces all the actions of nature to necessity. The reductionism resulting from the denial of the teleology of the world is a characteristic feature of Democritean mechanical necessitism.

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Philosophical Thought
Volume 3, Issue 4 - Serial Number 12
Autumn 2023
Pages 309-325