Whitehead and Causal Efficacy
By Bill Meacham, Ph.D.
Materialism, the metaphysical doctrine that at root all things are physical and that all phenomena, including mental events, can ultimately be traced to physical causes, is prevalent today. Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, for instance, says
… things are made of smaller things, and if you know what the small things do, then you can tell what the large things do. There is not a single known exception to this rule. … The behavior of a composite object (for example, you) is determined by the behavior of its constituents—that is, subatomic particles.
But the notion of cause is problematic. Philosophers can explain in what circumstances it makes sense to attribute causality to some type of thing or event, but doing so doesn’t tell us how causality works. Process-relational metaphysics, elucidated most thoroughly by Alfred North Whitehead and his followers, provides a better understanding than materialism.
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