Mereological Causation

Abstract I argue that there is a post-Parmenidean systematic approach to causation, adopted and developed by different philosophers of antiquity, which I call the Mereological Model of causation. According to the Mereological Model, a cause transfers its properties to what is causally affected by it, by coming to be part of its constitution, rather than by interaction with it. On the alternative approach, something changes something else by interacting with it. I call the latter the Interactive Model of causation; this is Aristotle’s account, which we have inherited and still by and large uphold today. I show that it is the Mereological Model that is dominant in antiquity, and that it even resurfaced after Aristotle, for instance in Stoic metaphysics. It is Aristotle who is the ‘outlier’ in this period of the history of metaphysics, with his Interactive Model of causation. This chapter is a contribution to systematic metaphysics in the sense that it studies a single philosophical model of causation adopted systematically in different metaphysical systems of antiquity, which reveals thus far understudied ties between such systems on account of their shared approach to causation.