Does Efficient Causation Presuppose Final Causation?

Does Efficient Causation Presuppose Final Causation?

Aquinas embraced the bold claim that there can be no efficient causation without final causation — therefore, there can be no movement from one place to another without a final cause. Early modern philosophers responded with a tough counter-example: inertial motion, which apparently has no final cause. This helps to explain how early modern philosophy defeated Thomism, the last gasp of Aristotelian teleology in physics — or at least many people think that it does. But this familiar tale of triumph assumes a specific reading of Aquinas’s understanding of final causation as well as a specific reading of the early modern alternative.

I shall argue against both,and in so doing will try to make the case that Aquinas’s argument succeeds,given a stripped-down understanding of final causation that is sufficiently robust to be of philosophical significance and that should prompt us to reconsider our current understanding of what counts as a teleological explanation.