Causality Reimagined: David Bentley Hart

This is a segment from a Zoom graduate seminar on the philosophy of David Bentley Hart held in the winter term of 2025.

I get my understanding of causality as a hermeneutics (a hermeneutical philosophy) based on basically three treatments of language in All Things are Full of Gods (2024):

"Language, Thought, and Code," pp. 261-275
"The Semantics of Life," pp. 323-334
"Language, Code, and Life," pp. 403-416

The segment "The Rise of Mechanism," from the same book, was discussed in the previous class, which served as the general framework for the discussion of causality. Hart's previously published book, The Experience of God (2013), frames the seminar in question (hence why it's mentioned at the outset) that develops some of my earlier thoughts on philosophy of religious studies.

A helfpul discussion about formal and final causes from this new (rather: very old) perspective can be found by none other than David Bentley Hart and Rupert Sheldrake here:    • Fields as Formal Causes, with David B...  . .