So, any substance S has at any moment some actualizer A of its existence.

The existence of S at any given moment itself presupposes the concurrent actualization of S’s potential for existence.

The occurrence of any change C presupposes some thing or substance S which changes.

So, any change is caused by something already actual.

No potential can be actualized unless something already actual actualizes it (the principle of causality).

So, the actualization of potential is a real feature of the world.

But change is the actualization of a potential.

Here is the formal presentation of the first stage of the argument (2017, pp. Although Feser first presents abovementioned argument informally, he also graciously includes a formal presentation. In this paper, I will argue that the argument is unsound due to a false premise in the first stage of the argument. In the first stage Feser argues that there must be a purely actual actualizer, and in the second stage that this purely actual actualizer must be God. In his ‘Five Proofs of the Existence of God’ (2017) Feser provides what he calls an Aristotelian argument for the existence of God. Key Words: Hierarchical causation, metaphysics, change, existence, god, relations, Feser. In the third section I will consider and respond to some possible objections.

In the second section, I try to argue that there is nothing in this characterization that prevents one from asserting the existence of symmetrical instances of hierarchical causation, which will mean that the premise 10 includes a false dilemma. For this purpose, in the first section of this paper I investigate his notion of hierarchical causation, especially regarding whether his examples reflect a unitary notion, in order to construct the most defensible characterization of hierarchical causation. More precisely, I argue that his argument is unsound on the grounds of one of the premises, namely the tenth premise, including a false dilemma. In this paper, I attempt to analyze Ed Feser’s Aristotelian Argument from his ‘Five Proofs of the Existence of God’ (2017). Deniz Saraç | Middle East Technical University

Ed feser 5 proofs