Antonio Hidalgo
Transcendental Causality and the Intelligibility of the Real
The Second Way in the Light of Contemporary Science
Abstract
What sustains, here and now, the existence and operation of all that is? Not when the universe began, but what grounds its causal activity at each instant. Recovering Aquinas’s Second Way in a synchronic key, this book argues that every network of causes acting at once and hierarchically must be finite and rest on a necessary, unconditioned first cause, the pure act of being. In dialogue with contemporary physics, it offers three convergent natural-deduction proofs, reinforced by modal reasoning in S5, and answers the strongest objections, from Hume and Russell to quantum indeterminism, the multiverse, and the recent thesis of existential inertia. A rigorous, contemporary case that the intelligibility of the real points to a transcendent foundation.
About the Author
Antonio Hidalgo (Hidalgo Pedraza) holds a Licentiate in Philosophy from the Comillas Pontifical University (Madrid, 1986–1991). Since 1994 he has taught philosophy at the Colegio Bética Mudarra in Córdoba (Spain). For two decades he taught Metaphysics, Philosophical Anthropology, History of Modern Philosophy, Natural Theology, Philosophy of Science and of Nature, and Logic at the “San Pelagio” Major Seminary in Córdoba, under the academic auspices of the Comillas Pontifical University (1994–1999) and the San Dámaso University (1999–2014). His research centers on metaphysics, natural theology, and the philosophy of nature and of science, in dialogue between the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition and contemporary physics. He is the author of El caballo de Troya de Descartes (Descartes’s Trojan Horse), Bubok, 2014.