Question

With God's help,
Question 1:
In your book That Which Is and That Which Is Not (the discussion also appears in the appendix to God Plays Dice, in the discussion between the informatavists and the actualists), you argue that on the essential level both the teleological theory and the causal theory do not really contradict one another in a certain sense, and you bring several distinctions on the ontological plane by distinguishing between the local and the global, and so on.
In any case, what matters for us is that the Aristotelian interpretation is, according to you, completely deterministic. But now, reading Wikipedia, I find a different interpretation of Aristotle and of other rationalist thinkers, and this is what is written there,

"Pocket watch

The watch metaphor is a good example for understanding the motivation and ideas of mechanistic philosophy, because the mechanistic philosophers thought that the whole world operates like a mechanical watch. The meaning of this analogy is that every motion is produced only by contact of matter with matter; objects that act as though they have a will may act that way for completely mechanistic reasons, and the world is entirely understandable if only we know how and where to look.
An example of the innovation brought by the watch can be found through a short thought experiment: think of a prehistoric man who travels through time and arrives in the twenty-first century. Obviously, when he sees a car moving he will think it is a very fast predator, and when he sees an airplane he will think it is a giant bird. That is, a person who sees a system but does not know how it works may think it is alive. Similarly, people in the sixteenth century looked at the watch. Although mechanical clocks appeared in Europe even before the fourteenth century, until the sixteenth century the clock mechanism was visible to the observer, and one could see how the system moved the hands. However, when in the sixteenth century they began producing clocks with operating systems hidden from sight, observing the clock led many to conclude that one can find mechanisms that appear alive and to possess an inner force that causes them to move, even though their entire operation is completely mechanical and fully predetermined. In other words, this observation led many to ask whether all of nature might be one great machine that seems alive to us only because we do not understand how it operates. In addition, the analogy of nature to a watch caused philosophers and scientists to think: if nature operates like a watch, then nature can be fully understood by human beings if only they discover how the watch mechanism works. Finally, the regularity found in the laws of nature also contributed to the idea that nature operates like a mechanical watch, since regularity can be explained by fixed mechanisms. The watch metaphor plays an important role among mechanistic philosophers, and use of the analogy of nature to a watch can be found in many writings from the sixteenth century onward, including the writings of Kepler, Descartes, and others."
So is there an essential distinction between the rationalists and the empiricists on the substantive level?
And Thomas Hobbes writes as follows:
"But if you ask what they mean when they speak of gravity, they will define it as a desire to descend toward the center of the earth. So the reason things sink downward is their desire to be below: or, in other words, bodies fall or rise because they fall or rise… as though stones and metals had desires, or as though they could identify the place they wish to reach, like a human being."
Do you agree with this interpretation in Aristotle's words as well?
Question 2:
When David Hume undermines the principle of causality, at exactly what point is he undermining it? For Hume writes as follows in his book A Treatise of Human Nature:
Hume tries to trace the source of the principle of causality. He asks: "How can our experience lead us to this principle? … Why do we infer that certain causes necessarily have certain effects, and why do we create the connection between causes and effects?" After analyzing possible explanations for this principle, he reaches the following conclusion: "There is nothing in any object, considered in itself, that can be taken as a reason for drawing a conclusion about something not connected with that object; and even after observing a causal relation between two objects, we have no reason to draw any inference concerning any object beyond those of which we have had experience."
So where exactly is the problem? Is the problem in expanding the concept of "cause," or in the concept of "cause" itself? And Professor Agassi writes about his words as follows:
"When I say, 'If we throw a stone at a glass window, the glass will shatter'—event A, 'we throw a stone at a window,' is the cause of event B—'the glass will shatter.' But event A represents infinitely many events that may differ from one another in the mass of the stone, its speed, or the dimensions of the window and the quality of the glass. Event B too represents a broad group of events that may differ from one another, for example in the number of shards produced by the breaking glass. In the same way, the statement 'fire burns paper' does not refer to any specific paper or any specific fire. We understand from this sentence that whenever any paper is placed in any fire, it will burn. How can we derive such a general law on the basis of a finite number of observations?"
So it seems that the problem is practical but not essential, in terms of the distinction between thinking and cognition. If so, I would be glad for elaboration regarding the problematic aspect of Hume within the rationalist conception.