From Anti-causalism to Causalism and Back (original) (raw)
Chapter Nine: Forms of Causality
TAKING UP MCLUHAN'S CAUSE, 2017
Formal causality has, in large part, been eschewed by both the philosophic and scientific communities alike. David Hume in particular levied an assault against any form of causality other than material cause. But formal cause is as viable a notion as material cause, and one that is of vital importance in both philosophy and science. By re-assessing Aristotle’s notion of formal causality, and interweaving it with inspirations from such diverse disciplines as Anthropology, Semiotics, and Communication Studies the notion of formal cause can be restored to its rightful place, along side material cause, as a fundamental principle of scientific and philosophical methods alike.
Erkenntnis
Hall has argued recently that there are two concepts of causality, picking out two different kinds of causal relation. McGrath, and Hitchcock and Knobe, have recently argued that the facts about causality depend on what counts as a default or normal state, or even on the moral facts. In the light of these claims you might be tempted to agree with Skyrms that causal relations constitute, metaphysically speaking, an amiable jumble, or with Cartwright that causation, though a single word, encompasses many different kinds of things. This paper argues, drawing on the author's recent work on explanation, that the evidence adduced in support of causal pluralism can be accommodated easily by a unified theory of causality—a theory according to which all singular causal claims concern the same fundamental causal network.
The metaphysical notion of causality
Maraka Charles , 2022
In the universe, we find things becoming and we realize that they come into being through the action of others. We have therefore chosen this theme on THE METAPHYSICAL NOTION OF CAUSALITY so as to understand this. We want to get to know the different causes, and whether there is that which causes all but is itself not caused. We are going to use the library sources to achieve this.
Why look at Causality In the Sciences: A manifesto
Citeseer
This chapter is the introduction to the volume. The volume editors begin by setting out a manifesto that puts forward two theses: first, that the sciences are the best place to turn in order to understand causality; second, that scientifically-informed philosophical investigation can bring something to the sciences too. Next, the chapter goes through the various parts of the volume, drawing out relevant background to and themes of the chapters in those parts. Finally, the chapter discusses the progeny of the papers and identify some next steps for research into causality in the sciences.
Causality and determination revisited
Synthese
It seems to be a platitude that there must be a close connection between causality and the laws of nature: the laws somehow cover in general what happens in each specific case of causation. But so-called singularists disagree, and it is often thought that the locus classicus for that kind of dissent is Anscombe's famous Causality & Determination. Moreover, it is often thought that Anscombe's rejection of determinism is premised on singularism. In this paper, I show that this is a mistake: Anscombe is not a singularist, but in fact only objects to a very specific, Humean understanding of the generality of laws of nature and their importance to causality. I argue that Anscombe provides us with the contours of a radically different understanding of the generality of the laws, which I suggest can be fruitfully developed in terms of recently popular dispositional accounts. And as I will show, it is this account of laws of nature (and not singularism) that allows for the possibili...
It is shown that two models of causality exist. There is dialectic model and evolution model. Two models have mutual tie. It is shown that the interactions must be analysed only within framework of dialectic model. Instantaneous interactions do not contradict dialectic model. The velocity of propagation of interactions is nonsense, and indeterminism is a false branch in philosophy and physics.
2006
Is the common cause principle merely one of a set of useful heuristics for dis-covering causal relations, or is it rather a piece of heavy duty metaphysics, capable of grounding the direction of causation itself? Since the princi-ple was introduced in Reichenbach’s groundbreaking work The Direction of Time (1956), there have been a series of attempts to pursue the latter program—to take the probabilistic relationships constitutive of the princi-ple of the common cause and use them to ground the direction of causation. These attempts have not all explicitly appealed to the principle as originally formulated; it has also appeared in the guise of independence conditions, counterfactual overdetermination, and, in the causal modelling literature, as the causal markov condition. In this paper, I identify a set of difficulties for grounding the asymmetry of causation on the principle and its descen-dents. The first difficulty, concerning what I call the vertical placement of causation, con...
Notes for an anti-eliminationist account of causation
The following text is complementary to the volume "Ontologie relazionali e Metafisica trinitaria" (ed. Morcelliana 2022), and is taken from the doctoral thesis. The text is English because it has been translated (provisionally) for presentation at a conference