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The first two Ways relate to causation. When Aquinas argues that a causal chain cannot be infinitely long, he does not have in mind a chain where each element is a prior event that causes the next event; in other words, he is not arguing for a first event in a sequence.
Four causes. Aristotle 's Four Causes illustrated for a table: material (wood), formal (structure), efficient (carpentry), final (dining). The four causes or four explanations are, in Aristotelian thought, four fundamental types of answer to the question "why?" in analysis of change or movement in nature: the material, the formal, the efficient ...
Some prominent classes of Proximate causal mechanisms include: The brain: For example, Broca's area, a small section of the human brain, has a critical role in linguistic capability. Hormones: Chemicals used to communicate among cells of an individual organism. Testosterone, for instance, stimulates aggressive behaviour in a number of species.
A proximate cause is an event which is closest to, or immediately responsible for causing, some observed result. This exists in contrast to a higher-level ultimate cause (or distal cause) which is usually thought of as the "real" reason something occurred. The concept is used in many fields of research and analysis, including data science and ...
Causal reasoning. Causal reasoning is the process of identifying causality: the relationship between a cause and its effect. The study of causality extends from ancient philosophy to contemporary neuropsychology; assumptions about the nature of causality may be shown to be functions of a previous event preceding a later one.
Thomism is the philosophical and theological school which arose as a legacy of the work and thought of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Dominican philosopher, theologian, and Doctor of the Church. In philosophy, Thomas's disputed questions and commentaries on Aristotle are perhaps his best-known works. In theology, his Summa Theologica is ...
Causal theory of reference. A causal theory of reference or historical chain theory of reference is a theory of how terms acquire specific referents based on evidence. Such theories have been used to describe many referring terms, particularly logical terms, proper names, and natural kind terms. In the case of names, for example, a causal ...
Koch's postulates. Robert Hermann Koch (11 December 1843 – 27 May 1910) was a German physician who developed Koch's postulates. [1] Koch's postulates (/ kɒx / KOKH) [2] are four criteria designed to establish a causal relationship between a microbe and a disease. The postulates were formulated by Robert Koch and Friedrich Loeffler in 1884 ...