Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · yt0.872

   For everything that happens, there is a cause or reason why. And again it's not crazy. In our everyday experience, that is kind of what we see. Things do not just happen. The book is not going to see just fly off into air. There seems to be reasons why things happen. If the book moves, it's because I moved it. And for Aristotle and for many other people, this metaphysical claim that things that happen do so because something causes them to happen, influenced their ideas about physics. So for Aristotle, if things are moving, it implies that something is moving them. There is a reason why things…

   yt/x26a-ztpQs8-the-big-picture-sean-carroll-talks-at-google/transcript.txt

2. 02 · yt0.807

   This is the real behavior of physical stuff in the universe. So Aristotle says, "I know what's going on. Motion is an unnatural state of being. There are natural ways for things in the universe to be places that things want to be in forms of motion that places and things want to have. And if you just let something go and don't disturb it, it will just sit there. It will not move. Motion requires an impetus, a mover. Something needs to be pushing it." This illustration stolen from the internet. The dog is not actually moving the car. You see the dog there, right? If you look very closely, there…

   yt/rqezWO5Yba8-sean-carrol-the-big-picture-on-the-origins-of-life-meaning-a/transcript.txt

3. 03 · yt0.788

   There's reasons why things exist, reasons why things happen. And this was elevated to a principle called the principle of sufficient reason. The principle of sufficient reason is literally the bumper sticker you see that says everything happens for a reason. Okay, there's a technical way of saying it that linenets uh the guy on the right said Spinosa is in the middle. All three of these philosophers promagated this principle and the way that Linus put it was the sake for which something happens is the final cause. Sorry, the principle sufficient reason is nothing is without a ground or reason …

   yt/rqezWO5Yba8-sean-carrol-the-big-picture-on-the-origins-of-life-meaning-a/transcript.txt

4. 04 · blog0.782

   For a broad range of cases, Aristotle implicitly makes twin claims about these four causes: (i) a complete explanation requires reference to all four; and (ii) once such reference is made, no further explanation is required. Thus, when appropriate, appeal to the four causes is both necessary and sufficient for completeness and adequacy in explanation. Although not all things which admit of explanation have all four causes, e.g., geometrical figures are not efficiently caused, even a brief overview of his psychological writings reveals that Aristotle regards all four causes as in play in the ex…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/aristotle-s-psychology.md

5. 05 · blog0.774

   This implies that even though we may answer the question as to why the elements move to their natural places—the light bodies up and the heavy ones down—by an appeal to their respective natures as causes (“that it is simply their nature to move somewhere, [ 43 ] and this is what it is to be light and to be heavy,” Physics 8.4, 255b13–17), we do not thereby specify their moving causes. Their thrust being in a single direction, the elements cannot circumvent even rather simple obstacles they may encounter on their way (a sealed container can retain air under water, the roof stays put pressing do…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/aristotle-s-natural-philosophy.md

6. 06 · yt0.769

   So when a whole bunch of children die, more than we might expect, we want someone to blame. And once that starts, we convince ourselves that we are on the right track, finding this reason for this happening. The picture on the left is what Lucia de Berk actually looks like. The picture on the right is the courtroom sketch of what she looks like. Once you decide that this person is the evil one who was responsible for this, then you look at her in a slightly different way. Fortunately the bad math went away. The good math took over and she was released, she was exonerated, and found innocent la…

   yt/x26a-ztpQs8-the-big-picture-sean-carroll-talks-at-google/transcript.txt

7. 07 · blog0.767

   Given the pressures just noted in favor of the inclusive reading of the interaction principle, we shall assume that it applies to all mental events in what follows. The interaction claim itself should be understood in terms that bring out the all-important extensional understanding of causation for Davidson, as follows: events that have a mental description cause and are caused by events that have a physical description. This formulation brings out his view that events are causally related no matter how they are described, and also leaves open the possibility, which Davidson will subsequently …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/anomalous-monism.md

8. 08 · blog0.765

   [ 22 ] The principle—which we could term the principle of causational synonymy—comes from Plato (see e.g. Phaedo 100B–101D), but Aristotle has his own reasons for endorsing it. His science attests to the presence and operation of causally active forms at each level of analysis of the physical world. [ 23 ] Hence, as we shall see, Aristotle’s forms are the causally significant components of the substance effecting a change. Accordingly, when it comes to specifying the moving cause of an artefact, Aristotle will refer to the art of the craftsman as the fundamental component operative in the chan…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/aristotle-s-natural-philosophy.md

9. 09 · blog0.764

   There were two sorts of these: proofs of the simple fact ( demonstrationes quia ) and proofs of the reasoned fact ( demonstrationes propter quid ). In the latter, the syllogisms involved must have middle terms that are causes of the state of affairs which is to be demonstrated. This gives a theory of scientific reasoning in which the structure of the arguments is intimately tied up with the structure of the causal chains that they demonstrate. There is, indeed, an extensive literature of medieval commentaries on the Posterior Analytics , and much of this literature is very important; we find i…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/medieval-theories-of-causation.md

10. 10 · blog0.764

    This view goes at least back to Hume who claimed, “We may define a cause to be an object followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second,” which is to say that “[…] if the first object had not been, the second never had existed” (Hume, [1748] 2007, 56). Although Hume did not explicitly say so, the expression “followed by” has always been read as “temporally followed by” and not “causally followed by”. So the adherents of this definition have usually tried to give an account of causation in which the cause and the effect are se…

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/backward-causation.md