1 See Sullivan's, Thomas D. “Coming to Be Without a Cause,” Philosophy, 65 (1990): 261–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “On the Alleged Causeless Beginning of the Universe: A Reply to Quentin Smith,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 33 (1994): 325–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Smith, Quentin, “Can Everything Come to Be Without a Cause?,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 33 (1994): 313–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Allen, Chad, “The Principle of Sufficient Reason and the Uncaused Beginning of the Universe,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 36 (1997): 555–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 To be sure, Sullivan labels this as the principle of sufficient reason. But, as it is the maxim that everything has an efficient cause, I have renamed it as the principle of causation. The principle of sufficient reason is, more properly, the Leibnizian principle that states that everything has an efficient cause, or a final cause, or a formal reason of being.

4 That is, the principle Sullivan calls “the principle of sufficient reason,” I will call “the principle of causation.”

5 Sullivan, “Coming to Be,” p. 268, and Sullivan, “On the Alleged,” p. 329. In the main text, I have skipped the condition “in a situation s,” as I think that causes are necessary conditions in any circumstance. Either way, the general discussion is not affected whether the condition is taken into account or not.

6 Sullivan, “On the Alleged,” p. 330, and Smith, “Can EverythingCome to Be,” p. 317.

7 Ibid., p. 318.

8 Ibid., p. 313.

9 Sullivan, “On the Alleged,” pp. 331–32.

10 Sullivan is not arguing, like Hobbes, that everything that has a beginning in time has a cause of its beginning in time because to exist in time and to be caused are, in some way, intimately related concepts. See Hobbes, Thomas, Treatise, Of Liberty and Necessity, in Chappell, V., ed., Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 15–42; prop. 33, pp. 39–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Sullivan, “On the Alleged,” p. 330.

12 Allen, “The Principle of Sufficient Reason,” pp. 558–60.

13 Sullivan, “On the Alleged,” p. 330, where Sullivan quotes and accepts Smith's own words in “Can Everything Come to Be,” p. 318.

14 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), Vol. 8, 1, q. 44, a 1.Google Scholar

15 Note that when Aquinas uses the analogy as a human being cannot be without a sense of humour his aim is to show that the relation to the cause is equally necessary, not to show that being caused is an essential property (i.e., a property that belongs to what—to the nature of what—is caused).

16 Remember Hume's words against the principle of causation: “[I]t will be easy for us to conceive any object to be non-existent this moment, and existent the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea of a cause or productive principle. The separation, therefore, of the idea of a cause from that of a beginning of existence, is plainly possible for the imagination; and consequently the actual separation of these objects is so far possible, that it implies no contradiction nor absurdity; and is therefore incapable of being refuted by any reasoning from mere ideas” (Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), I, iii, iii, pp. 79–80)Google Scholar. It could be pointed out, against my conclusion in the text, that Hume is claiming that the idea of the beginning of existence of something is clearly separable from the idea of cause while Aquinas argues that in the idea of something there is no reference to a cause. However, Hume probably used the expression “the beginning of existence of a thing” to note, contra Hobbes, that even if every thing begins to exist in time, this fact does not show that it is caused. Hume, then, is not including in his argument the notion of existence that Aquinas will use to argue that everything is necessarily caused. On the other hand, Aquinas's argumentation is independent of temporal considerations: he believes that the relation to the cause is demonstrable whether things begin in time or not. So we can say that both arguments are parallel to this extent: both deny ana priori demonstration of the principle of causation from the consideration of the ideas or concepts of the things that occur, by hypothesis, causally related. (The parallelism remains even if it is also true that Aquinas's ideas are closer to a contemporary notion of concept while Hume's ideas are more like mental images.)

17 Aquinas did not use the term “contingent” when he established the doctrine that the essence of things is separable from their existence. However, I think that this separability thesis can be read as a medieval account of our actual understanding of “metaphysical contingency.” That the existence of a thing is separable from its essence means that it could have failed to exist, i.e., that it is contingent. (Note also that I am not referring to the usual interpretation, as in his Third Way, of Aquinas's “possibilia” in terms of some “Aristotelian contingency” closely related to temporal considerations.)

18 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Vol. 2, 1, q. 3, a 4.

19 Aquinas, “On Being and Essence,” in Aquinas on Being and Essence, translated and interpreted by Bobik, J. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), pp. 160–61, para. 80.Google Scholar

20 On the controversy see, for example, Munitz, Milton K., Existence and Logic (New York: New York University Press, 1974), chaps. 4 and 5Google Scholar, and Grossmann, Reinhardt, The Existence of the World: An Introduction to Ontology (New York: Routledge, 1992), chap. 4.Google Scholar

21 Aquinas wrote: “[P]roperties that belong to a thing over and above its own nature must derive from somewhere, either from that nature itself … or from an external cause” (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 3, a. 4); and “whatever belongs to a thing is either caused by the principles of its nature … or comes to it from some extrinsic principle” (“On Being and Essence,” para. 80). This, I believe, indicates that Aquinas himself assumed the principle of causation in his proof for the creation of everything. See also Kretzmann, Norman, The Metaphysics of Creation: Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa contra gentiles, II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 65–66.Google Scholar

22 Sullivan, “On the Alleged,” p. 330.

23 Setting this out more explicitly, Sullivan is arguing that:

1. (Implicit) There is a property by which caused contingent things are caused.

2. Any property would give us an arbitrary partition of the set of contingent things.

3. So, the property is contingency itself. Now, as far as no connection is shown between being caused and any other property, (2) is true except, of course, for one property: being caused (or any equivalent). So (3) is false, and it is false for the same reasons for which (2) is true! Consequently, (1) is false— or the property is being caused itself.

24 Sullivan, “Coming to Be,” p. 268, and Sullivan, “On the Alleged,” p. 327.

25 One does not employ the principle that everything has an efficient cause when trying to deny it—though the contrary seems true when it is the principle of sufficient reason that is under consideration: arguing against it implies giving a reason against it.

26 While I worked on this article I was supported by the Basque Government. Some of the ideas here were presented at the Conference, Analytic Philosophy at the Turn of the Millennium, Santiago de Compostela, 1999. My special thanks to Fernando Martinez-Manrique and Mark Moyer for discussing some of the arguments and for their help with the English language.