Who killed the causality of things

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21364040
AutoresRobert Pasnau (0000-0003-0193-0261, University of Colorado Boulder USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Volumen59
Número3
Páginas771-795
Fecha de publicación2025-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaNoûs (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0029-4624 • E-ISSN: 1468-0068
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/nous.12525
OpenAlexW4403649817
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas44

Modern analyses of causation standardly treat cause and effect as events.Disagreement persists over what exactly events are, and whether some nearby analysis-perhaps in terms of facts or states of affairs-might be superior.There is, however, not much sympathy for the traditional understanding of causes as persisting things, whether those be substances, powers, or properties.One does still find hearty bands of enthusiasts who defend such old-school ideas.But to endorse things as causes requires setting oneself against the mainstream of research in the metaphysics of causation.Although the shift in causal theory from things to events is well-known, the precise point at which that shift happened has been lost to time.It is familiar enough that the long run of Aristotelianism was sympathetic to things as causes.But as to when, in the post-Aristotelian modern era, the transformation occurred, no one seems to know.Some see the change as coming with the rise of the mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century, and others with David Hume in the eighteenth century. 1 Both of these suggestions are relevant to the story, but each fails to identify the true culprit.The question of who killed causation as a relation between things thus remains unsettled.We have on our hands a murder mystery, which the present paper means to solve.In the spirit of that genre, I defer revealing my answer until the end of the paper.(Readers in no mood for games can look ahead to 5.)To pursue my quarry, I begin by tracing the modern story back until the trail grows cold ( 1).At that point I start my canvass anew, with the old Aristotelian tradition ( 2).There we will find a climate that both fosters the causality of things and discourages events as causes.Even so, the late medieval context will offer us one important clue, the murder weapon, even if not the murderer himself ( 3).That sets the stage for looking at the seventeenth century, where we will find a climate in which the event-causal framework becomes at least conceivable, and yet where thing-causation remains unchallenged.That brings us to Hume, who might appear to have the requisite motive, but who in fact can be exonerated 1 There has been, so far as I can find, no systematic historical treatment of this issue, and only occasional discussions in passing.Among those, Harr and Madden (1975) remark that the origin of the event-causal framework is "obscure," but go on to invoke Hume (p.3).Swinburne (1997) also ascribes the shift to Hume (p.80), Buckareff (2017) speaks of "the neo-Humean emphasis on events" (p.1025), and Van Cleve (2015) remarks that "in Reid's day, agent causation was taken for granted and event causation regarded as a Humean innovation of doubtful intelligibility" (p.377).Lowe (2008) invokes the more general early modern shift toward an anti-metaphysical empiricism (p.139), and Rowe (1991) adverts to "the influence of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century physics" (p.55)

Causality (physics) · Epistemology · Physics · Computer Science · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life