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first: 2011-10-20
last: 2011-10-22 |
The concept of final cause vanished due to two developments.
First, the concept was considered to belong to the domain of the mysteries.
For example Descartes stated:
[t]hat he [God] is capable of countless things whose causes are beyond my
knowledge. And for this reason alone I consider the customary search for
final cause to be useless in physics; there is considerable rashness in
thinking myself capable of investigating the impenetrable purposes of God.
[Descartes 1641: Meditations IV,55]
Then there was Hume's view, based on the success of physics, since the
mathematical foundation of mechanics by Newton's laws:
Elasticity, gravity, cohesion of parts, communication of motion by impulse;
these are probably the ultimate causes and principles which we shall ever
discover in nature and we may esteem ourselves sufficiently happy, if by
accurate enquiry and reasoning, we can trace up the particular phenomena to,
or near to, these general principles. [Hume 1748: section IV/22-26]
This reduction was confirmed in Kant's
Kritik der reinen Vernunft. With
causation as one of his categories of knowledge, he explicitly referred to
Hume's
principium causalitatis. [Kant1787} B19). Since then
efficient
cause has remained virtually the only causal mode in the philosophy of
science, in particular of physics, that was considered as the reference
model for scientific knowledge. In practice the life sciences continued to
use the final cause in their understanding of nature.
Unfortunately insufficient attention has been given later to the analysis
Kant made in his Kritik der Urteilskraft}. In the second part of the
Kritik
der teleologischen Urteilskraf Kant introduces again the notion of
final
cause, although he is not using the Aristotelean terminology of the
final
cause. He there makes the distinction between the existence of the basic
goal directed mechanism in nature
objektiven Zweckmässigkeit and the
understanding of this concept in the
Dialektik der teleologische
Urteilskraft. [Kant 1790: second part sections 61-91] But as there
was no theoretical and mathematical foundation of these mechanisms, such as
the laws of Newton did to ground the mechanical oriented notion of efficient
causation, they did not receive the status of the
efficient cause at that
time.