A Cause for Concern: Standard Abstracta and Causation

Abstract

Benjamin Callard has recently suggested that causation between Platonic objects—standardly understood as atemporal and non-spatial—and spatio-temporal objects is not ‘a priori’ unintelligible. He considers the reasons some have given for its purported unintelligibility: apparent impossibility of energy transference, absence of physical contact, etc. He suggests that these considerations fail to rule out a priori Platonic-object causation. However, he has overlooked one important issue. Platonic objects must causally affect different objects differently, and different Platonic objects must causally affect the same objects differently. How are Platonic objects—ones outside space and time—supposed to do that?