Announcement: 13.01.2026 Guest lecture of Stephan Schmid: Powers, Laws, and Successions: On the Transformation of the Notion of Cause in the Early Modern Period

16 December 2025

Prof. Dr. Stephan Schmid, Professor of History of Philosophy at the University of Hamburg, will hold a lecture on the topic »Powers, Laws, and Successions: On the Transformation of the Notion of Cause in the Early Modern Period«.

What exactly does it mean and on account of what is it that one thing—such as a hot stove—has an effect on something else—such as the kettle on it? Late Aristotelian authors of the early modern period typically answered this question by pointing out that things, due to their substantial and accidental forms, are endowed with a range of powers or potentialities that, under the right circumstances, would actualize in characteristic ways. Influenced by the emerging mechanistic physics of the time, which promised to explain natural processes exclusively in terms of motions of physical parts, many authors of this period rejected this explanation and advocated a worldview that did not rely on substantial and accidental forms which they considered obscure. But this also raised the question of the nature of causality for these authors, which they sought to answer in very different ways. After an outline of Francisco Suárez's late Aristotelian understanding of causality, I will briefly present René Descartes', Nicolas Malebranche's, and David Hume's answers to the question of the nature of causality, in view of which we can trace the development of the modern conception of causality that is very much influenced by David Hume.

Time: Tuesday, January 13, 2026, 04:15 pm
Venue: Gorch-Fock-Wall 3, 20354 Hamburg

Registration: caroline.herfert"AT"uni-hamburg.de