This picture of the will fits with one of Aristotle's major causal doctrines: that nothing causes a change in itself.
Finally, Aquinas's causal doctrines help us to explain his insistence on the distinction between the analogy of many-to-one and the analogy of one-to-another.
They are rather general causal doctrines that apply to a special class of intentional states, like sensation and understanding, where the intentional state is about what brings it about — that is, it is about its own cause — something that is not true of intentional states in general.
Both the inclusive care argument and the funerals argument illustrate another common Mohist rhetorical strategy: tracing the causal consequences of a doctrine or policy, typically to show that Mohist doctrine yields results that tally with some standard while an opposing doctrine does not.
Accordingly, in his later discussions of the divine names, notably in the Summa contra gentiles and the Summa theologiae, Aquinas returns to the analogy of attribution, but links it much more closely with his doctrines of causal similitude.
This is the doctrine that the causal relations that properties bear to other properties exhaust their natures.
But this assumption commits its proponents to the causal completeness of physics (a doctrine that Sober sketches toward the end of his 1999).
This would seem to be justified either by an appeal to Completeness (§2.4) or to Davidson's doctrine (§5.1) that causal relations must fall under strict (and so physical) laws.
This led to the widespread acceptance of the doctrine now known as the "causal closure" or the "causal completeness of the physical", according to which all physical effects have fully physical causes.
As abstract entities, it is also difficult to understand how ideas can have causal powers, in keeping with the doctrine of efficacious ideas, or how they can be identical with God's substance (Jolley 1990, 76f).
