ABSTRACT
Since our account of the Cartesian method places causal explanation at the center of Descartes’s concerns, it is imperative that we clarify what he meant by a causal explanation. To do so, we turn to that place in the Third Meditation where he suggests that God, and only God, is self-caused (AT 7: 49-50, CSM 2: 34). This claim results in objections, first from Caterus and then from Arnauld, that an efficient cause must be distinct from its effect, and therefore the notion of self-causation is unintelligible (AT 7: 95, CSM 2: 68; AT 7: 20713, CSM 2: 146-50). In the course of his reply to Arnauld, Descartes distinguishes between a formal cause and an efficient cause, contends that God’s essence is properly the formal cause of God’s existence, and attempts to find a cause midway between a formal cause and an efficient cause.
