Agent Causation: Before and After the Ontological Turn

Imagine Ludwig has a cup of tea for breakfast. He\ud pours it; he eats his egg until it seems to him that the tea\ud should have the right temperature; he moves his hand to\ud the cup, puts his fingers at the handle, and then, careful\ud not to spill anything, he does something with his arm;\ud namely, he raises it, and if all goes well he then drinks the\ud tea without burning his lips.\ud The rising of Ludwig"s arm surely has a cause. But\ud what is the cause? Defenders of agent causation, such as\ud Thomas Reid (1788), Richard Taylor (1966), Roderick\ud Chisholm (1976a), and many more recent authors (see\ud Swinburne 1997, ch. 5; Thorp 1980; Meixner 1999; Clarke\ud 1996; O'Connor 2000) have argued that the rising of\ud Ludwig"s arm is caused by Ludwig himself. Some events\ud are caused, not by other events, but by concrete things, by\ud substances, more specifically by intentional agents

A World of Fields

Trope ontology is exposed and confronted with the question where one trope ends and another begins. It is argued that tropes do not have determinate boundaries, it is arbitrary how tropes are carved up. An ontology, which I call field ontology, is proposed which takes this into account. The material world consists of a certain number of fields, each of which is extended over all of space. It is shown how field ontology can also tackle the problem of determin-able properties and the problem of completeness of things