Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle

Question Three

QUESTION THREE Text of Aristotle: "Now some things owe their necessity to something other than themselves; others do not, but are themselves the source of necessity in other things.”(Metaphysics V, ch. 1, 1015b 9-11) Have necessary beings a cause of their existence? Do necessary beings have a cause of their existence? [Arguments Pro and Con] 1 [1] That they do not: Avicenna in Metaphysics I, ch. 6:1 Because everything having existence through a cause, if you write off the cause, has no existence, and then it is not necessary of itself; therefore nothing necessary of itself is caused. 2 Also, "the efficient cause is the principle from which motion stems,"2 but in immobile things there is no motion. 3 For the opposite: In Bk. II of this work:3 there are causes of necessary or sempiternal things. [I.—TO THE QUESTION] 4 It must be said that if something can be a necessary effect, its necessity can have an efficient cause, just as the thing itself has a cause, because it is necessary to assume one thing from which the causality of everything [in it] stems. For if the necessity of the effect would have no cause, since it is in what is caused, something in the caused would not be caused. 1 Avicenna, Metaphysica I, ch. 7, AviL 43-44. 2 Aristotle, Metaphysics V, ch. 2, 1013a 30-32. 3 Aristotle, Metaphysics II, ch. 1 993b 26-31. 372 THE METAPHYSICS OF JOHN DUNS SCOTUS [II.—TO THE INITIAL ARGUMENTS] 5 [2] As for what Avicenna says:4 he understands this of what is necessary per se. But something is said to be necessary per se effectively , so that ‘per se’ only excludes another prior efficient cause, and in this sense God alone is necessary per se in the genre of efficient causes. 6 Or something can be formally necessary per se, and such can be existing from another, because as formally necessary in itself it is effectively from another, and thus its necessity is also from another. Then to the form [of the argument]; "if you write off the cause, such a thing would not be necessary of itself,”is true in the genre of efficient cause. Formally, however, if its form could stand on its own, it would have necessity without the efficient cause, but it could not exist without the first [cause]; hence, if this be written off, you will also write off the formal intrinsic cause of the necessity that follows from it. For it does not have part [of its being] from itself, and part from the efficient cause. Rather the whole, both its nature and its necessity, stem from its efficient cause, which if removed, everything is taken away. 7 To the contrary: "if something is written off, it is not necessary.”It is only necessary by supposition.5 —To this one must say that what is necessary from a necessary supposition, is itself necessary. 8 To the other,6 I respond that this is an a posteriori description from what is better known. For it is not simply from its character as an efficient cause that it is a principle of motion; it is incidental to an efficient qua efficient that it act through movement, because an efficient cause can act without motion; however, in natural [efficient causes] it is generally true [that they act through motion]. 4 Cf. supra, n. 1. 5 Namely, by making an assumption such as was done in the exercises of De obligationibus. 6 Cf. supra, n. 2. BOOK V QUESTION THREE 373 [III.— FURTHER REPLY TO THE QUESTION] 9 [3] {{A response to the question: for an effect to be necessary, a cause is needed that is necessary both in being and in causing, since if either of these conditions is absent, the effect can not exist. 10 In complex things [i.e., logically necessary propositions and inferences] both are found. For principles in themselves are necessary, and they cause the conclusion necessarily, because the characteristic of a cause necessarily causing, is that if the effect is destroyed, it too is destroyed. This is the way it is with principles with respect to their conclusions, according to Physics II, ch. 8.7 11 In simple notions or in the entity of things, there is no cause that is necessary in both ways; for unless the first cause existed, no cause...