ABSTRACT
In an essay on Thomas Aquinas published in 1961, Peter Geach contends that all of Thomas’s Five Ways, i.e. the five arguments for the existence of a God presented in the Summa theologiae, have in common a move which he calls “lumping together.” Peter Geach tells that, in proposing this, he is opposing certain theologians who wish to conceive of the Ways as starting from the existence of any random object and arriving at the existence of a God. He argues that the causal explanation of any particular object is satisfied by pointing out the immediate particular cause or causes, as the child is caused by the parents. It is clear from what he says that Geach’s world consists in a causal system, origins of change that require ontologically prior to them other origins of change.
