Anna Marmodoro

Anna Marmodoro is Full Professor of Philosophy and holds the Chair of Metaphysics in the Department of Philosophy of Durham University. She is concomitantly an Associate Member of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Oxford. She has been directing a large-scale multidisciplinary research group, with funding (in successive stages) from the European Research Council, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and the AHRC.

She is also the co-founder and co-editor with Erasmus Mayr of the peer-reviewed journal Dialogoi. Ancient Philosophy Today, published by Edinburgh University Press (2019-), whose distinctive mission is to provide a forum for publication of work in ancient philosophy that bears on contemporary philosophical discussions or vice versa. 

The project

Title: Suárez’s Platonism in his Aristotelian account of causation

"What is it for one thing to cause an effect upon another thing? Most fundamentally, on any realist account of causation, a cause makes a difference to another thing’s being, changing its constitution, in terms of either essential or non-essential properties, according to how radical the change is. I argued in earlier work (2021, and also forthcoming in press) that there are two ways to take this conception of causation forward: one might think that a cause changes another thing’s being by adding (/subtracting) being to (/from) it, or by interacting with it. I showed that the former model of causation is historically the first and philosophically the mainstream one in Classical Antiquity. It is also an intuitive way of explaining causation, on account of a part-whole relation between the cause and what is causally affected by it; e.g. making seawater drinkable is subtracting salt from it. The key feature of this model of causation is that qualitive change is reduced to quantitative change; change is addition or subtraction of being, namely of ‘components’ or ‘parts’ of a thing’s constitution. I call this the Mereological Model of causation, and have shown it predominant before Aristotle, but also afterwards (in the Stoics)."

Hosting Institution: Sorbonne Université

Selective bibliography

• Properties in Ancient Metaphysics, CUP, December 2023, pp. 70
• Forms and Structure in Plato’s Metaphysics, OUP, December 2021, pp. vii + 232
• Metaphysics: An introduction to Contemporary Debates and Their History, co-authored with Erasmus Mayr, OUP, March 2019, pp. xii + 221
• Everything in Everything. Anaxagoras’s Metaphysics, OUP, March 2017, pp. xi + 224
• Aristotle on Perceiving Objects, OUP, June 2014, pp. ix + 304