Author · Metaphysics · Causation
Essays on first causes, physical explanation, and the point at which adding another physical antecedent stops answering the question.
About
James W. Sterling, III writes about metaphysics and causation, with particular attention to Aquinas's first-mover argument and modern attempts to replace a non-derivative source with another physical event, object, field, fluctuation, process, or prior state.
The work focuses on explanatory structure: what follows when every proposed physical source remains inside the physical description whose sufficiency is itself under examination?
Published work
Boundary Enlargement and the Failure of Physical-Source Substitution
Aquinas's First Way is not fundamentally a search for the earliest event in time. It concerns explanatory dependence. This paper examines the modern substitution of an earlier or wider physical source and argues that enlarging the physical boundary does not provide the kind of explanatory terminus Aquinas's argument requires.
Read on ZenodoClosing the Modern Physicalist Escape Route
This paper places the McKinley and Clarke initiation-scaffold corpus alongside Aquinas's classical dependence argument. Aquinas supplies the restriction that a series of dependent actualizers does not become self-explanatory merely by adding another dependent member; the modern extension shows why substituting another physical source leaves the explanatory problem intact.
Read on ZenodoThemes
What an explanatory terminus must be if it is not simply another dependent member of the same chain.
Why adding a proposed physical source enlarges the physical system rather than terminating the explanatory question.
Separating the classical structure of the first-mover argument from claims about a first event in time.
James W. Sterling, III
The papers above are archived on Zenodo with persistent DOIs so the arguments remain publicly accessible, citable, and versioned.