Newton’s Modal Metaphysics and Polemics with Spinozism in the “General Scholium”

This chapter is devoted to explaining the nature and use of metaphysical necessity in Newton’s “General Scholium.” In particular, it focuses on Newton’s metaphysical commitments about (i) the nature of modality; (ii) the nature of formal causation; and (iii) God’s existence. In order to explain these, the chapter draws on Clarke and Clarke’s subsequent correspondence with Joseph Butler. In order to clarify some philosophical distinctions, I treat Toland’s Spinozism, in particular, as the target of some of Newton’s arguments. Along the way, I’ll provide suggestive evidence that Newton was in a decent position to distinguish the thought of Descartes from Spinozism

Newtonian Emanation, Spinozism, Measurement, and the Baconian Origins of the Laws of Nature

The first two sections of this chapter investigate what Newton could have meant in a now famous passage from De Graviatione that “space is as it were an emanative effect of God.” First it offers a careful examination of the four key passages. The chapter shows that the internal logic of Newton’s argument permits several interpretations. In doing so, the paper calls attention to a Spinozistic strain in Newton’s thought. Second it sketches four interpretive options: (i) one approach is generic neo-Platonic; (ii) another approach is associated with the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More, while a variant on this (ii+) emphasizes that Newton mixes Platonist and Epicurean themes; (iii) a necessitarian approach; (iv) an approach connected with Bacon’s efforts to reformulate a useful notion of form and laws of nature. The paper offers new arguments to treat Newtonian emanation as a species of Baconian formal causation as articulated in part two of Bacon’s New Organon.

Family and non-family sources of knowledge diversity in family firms: The role of causation logics

This article will critically analyse the sources and the role of knowledge diversity in informing causation logics in family firms. Family firms rely on knowledge resources from both intra-family and extra-family sources, which may require different approaches to effectively manage. We argue that as family firms acquire greater knowledge diversity, family-centred effectuation processes become limited and they will increasingly rely on formal causation logics to coordinate these resources. However, we expect this relationship to differ when knowledge diversity is sourced from either family or non-family sources. Empirical analyses of 242 small- and medium-sized family firms indicate that knowledge diversity positively affects a firm’s reliance on causation logics, regardless of the source of that diversity. This suggests that the affinity of family firms to leverage effectuation logics may not be characteristic of family firms in general, but instead may be an artefact of firm reliance on knowledge capital concentrated in family owners.

The Two Highest Goods

The chapter argues that we can construe the relationship between Kant’s account of the moral law and God as a type of concurring moral dependence, on the basis of formal causation, such that the very activity of willing the moral law is a type of participation in the uncreated divine mind. In the end, morality does require divinity, and, even, a (carefully specified) type of divine activity, albeit that we do not arrive at this commitment through a traditional acceptance of the categories of revelation and faith. It is argued that there is a defensible sense of the notion of ‘divinity’ that Kant can be said to have warrant to believe in, given his assumptions about freedom, although it is a rather different sort of divinity from the ‘divine being’ of philosophical (let alone Christian) theism. I suggest that in his final fragmentary writings, Kant might be said to show some awareness of this. This interpretation throws a new light on Kant’s conception of the Kingdom of Ends, whereby the happiness that constitutes the highest good can be construed as an enactment of divinity, through willing the moral law, rather than the contemplation of a divine being.

Emergence, Downward Causation, and No Brute Facts in Biological Systems

This chapter explains emergence in biological organizations through a conception of ontological emergence according to which certain types of dynamical organizations possess irreducible properties that are nevertheless derivable from the substrate. The authors concentrate on the ontological dimension of emergence as the irreducibly causal configuration exhibited by all organizations that manifest persistence and stability in their environment. This is a conception of ontological emergence where the locus of novel causal powers is the configuration of constituents into stable dynamic organizations. There is nothing brute to be explained in the emergence of causal properties in a biological organization; all that is needed is the consideration of its organizational characteristics in terms of same-level and inter-level causal interactions, the type of which is of formal causation for interactions among the constituents of the organization and of efficient causation for interactions among the constituents and the micro-properties of their surrounding emergence base.