The Second Way against Russell and Humeanism: A Synchronic Reappraisal

This essay states in brief compass the argument developed at length in Transcendental Causality and the Intelligibility of the Real: The Second Way in the Light of Contemporary Science (Neunkirchen-Seelscheid, Editiones Scholasticae, 2026; ISBN 978-3-86838-320-1), and is posted here with the publisher's kind permission. Aquinas's Second Way is usually written off together with the arguments from a first beginning. Hume is said to have shown that causal inference lacks a priori warrant, Russell that nothing stops us from taking the universe as an ultimate fact. Both criticisms, however, tell against a version that is not the argument's own, the one that turns it into a search for the first temporal link. Read synchronically, the Way does not ask how the universe began. It asks what sustains, here and now, the existence and the operation of everything there is. Its two load-bearing joints are an existential premise, that the cosmos contains causal multiplicities essentially and actually subordinated (today better described as hierarchical networks than as chains) and a categorial premise, according to which no concatenation of derived sufficiencies, even an infinite one, yields intrinsic sufficiency. From these it follows that the existence of the first cause is independent of every global property of any cosmological model, so that eternity, cycles and the multiverse are strictly irrelevant to the proof. The principle of sufficient reason the argument employs survives Della Rocca's threat of modal collapse once a founding reason is distinguished from a determining one.