ARISTOTELE E LA TEORIA MANIPOLATIVA DELLA CAUSALITÀ

Abstract

I put forward a “conceptualist” stance on causality. It seems to me that “causes” are not in nature, in ontological and realist sense (in re), but that when we refer to a cause and its effect, in some scientific proposition, we are referring to a concatenation of events that the theory1 connects according to its own paradigmatic presuppositions; this concatenation cannot be easily (or perhaps not at all) transferred into a theory2, that is incommensurable with respect to theory1. The causal chains are maps drawn on an unknown but real territory, a predefined and per se territory which is adapted to the form that the epistemic subject, of whatever species it may be, gives it. Aristotle is the real father of the causal language of science, but Aristotelian causality is profoundly different from the modern and contemporary concept of causality. It is very useful to study the birth of the concept of cause in the light of the contemporary manipulative theory of causality to understand what causation really is.