Causal Necessity in Aristotle

Like many realists about causation and causal powers, Aristotle uses the language of necessity when discussing causation, and he appears to think that by invoking necessity, he is clarifying the manner in which causes bring about or determine their effects. In so doing, he would appear to run afoul of Humean criticisms of the notion of a necessary connection between cause and effect. The claim that causes necessitate their effects may be understood— or attacked— in several ways, however, and so whether the view or its criticism is tenable depends on how we understand the necessitation claim. In fact, Aristotelian efficient causation may be said to involve two distinct necessary connections: one is a relation between causes considered as potential, while the other relates them considered as active. That is, the claims that (1) what has the power to heat necessarily heats what has the power to be heated, and that (2) a particular flame which is actually under a pot necessarily heats it, both of which appear to be true for Aristotle, involve distinct notions of necessity. The latter kind of necessity is based on the facts, as Aristotle sees them, about change, whereas the former is based in the nature of properties. Though different, both kinds of necessity are instances of what contemporary philosophers would call metaphysical necessity, and together they also amount to a theory of causal determination.     

Of particles and fields

In The Cosmic Blueprint,1 1 Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2004). View all notes Paul Davies takes note of the unresolved philosophical issues involved in the use of “field” imagery within evolutionary biology and quantum physics. The author proposes that the metaphysical scheme of Alfred North Whitehead with its notion of “actual occasions” might be key to solving these mysteries, but only if Whiteheadian “societies” were reinterpreted as enduring structured fields of activity for the ongoing succession of their constituent actual occasions. For, implicit in this revised understanding of Whiteheadian societies is a new paradigm for the philosophical relation between the One and the Many, which would allow for genuine top-down as well as bottom-up causation in the emergence of new forms or structures within the evolutionary process.     

Moral Instincts and the Problem with Reductionism: A Critical Look at the Work of Marc Hauser

In his most recent book Moral Minds, Marc Hauser argues that many foundational moral instincts have clear biological explanations. To make this argument, Hauser focuses on the similarities between the acquisition of morality and the acquisition of language. Similar to language, one learns a particular moral framework from one's environment, but the biological components necessary for moral development are universal. While I agree with Hauser's overall conclusion regarding moral instincts, I reject the notion that a purely biological analysis of morality can provide an adequate framework for justification. The problem, as I see it, is Hauser acknowledges the bottom-up influences taking place between biology and moral formation, but he refuses to account for the top-down influences that occur between metaphysical assumptions, moral beliefs, and biological conclusions. Thus, the current critique will focus on the connection between Hauser's failure to account for top-down influence and the subsequent shortcoming related to moral justification.     

Absence Causation and a Liberal Theory of Causal Explanation

For the framework of event causation—i.e. the framework according to which causation is a relation between events—absences or omissions pose a problem. Absences, it is generally agreed, are not events; so, under the framework of event causation, they cannot be causally related. But, as a matter of fact, absences are often taken to be causes or effects. The problem of absence causation is thus how to make sense of causation that apparently involves absences as causes or effects. In an influential paper, Helen Beebee offers a partial solution to the problem by giving an account of causation by absence (i.e. causation in which absences are supposed to be causes). I argue that Beebee's account can be extended to cover causation of absence (i.e. causation in which absences are supposed to be effects) as well. More importantly, I argue that the extended Beebeeian account calls for a major modification to David Lewis's theory of causal explanation, usually taken as standard. Compared to the standard theory, the result of this modification, which I shall call ‘the liberal theory of causal explanation’, has, among other things, the advantage of being able to accommodate causal explanations in which the explananda are not given in terms of events.     

Intrinsic Causation in Humean Supervenience

The paper investigates whether causation is extrinsic in Humean Supervenience (HS) in the sense that being caused by is an intrinsic relation between token causes and effects. The underlying goal is to test whether causality is extrinsic for Humeans and intrinsic for anti‐Humeans in this sense. I argue that causation is typically extrinsic in HS, but it is intrinsic to event pairs that collectively exhaust almost the whole of history. 1     

Luck and Free Will

This essay sketches a problem about luck for typical incompatibilist views of free will posed in Alfred Mele, Free Will and Luck (2006), and examines recent reactions to that problem. Reactions featuring appeals to agent causation receive special attention. Because the problem is focused on decision making, the control that agents have over what they decide is a central topic. Other topics discussed include the nature of lucky action and differences between directly and indirectly free actions.     

Consistent Treatment of Variables and Causation Poses a Challenge for Behavioral Research Methods: A Commentary on Nesselroade and Molenaar (2016)

Nesselroade and Molenaar presented the ideographic filter as a proposal for analyzing lawful regularities in behavioral research. The proposal highlights an inconsistency that poses a challenge for behavioral research more generally. One can distinguish a broadly Humean approach from a broadly non-Humean approach as they relate to variables and to causation. Nesselroade and Molenaar rejected a Humean approach to latent variables that characterizes them as nothing more than summaries of their manifest indicators. By contrast, they tacitly accepted a Humean approach to causes characterized as nothing more than summaries of their manifest causal effects. A non-Humean treatment of variables coupled with a Humean treatment of causation creates a theoretical tension within their proposal. For example, one can interpret the same model elements as simultaneously representing both variables and causes. Future refinement of the ideographic filter proposal to address this tension could follow any of a number of strategies.     

Hume and the phenomenology of agency

Some philosophers argue that Hume, given his theory of causation, is committed to an implausibly thin account of what it is like to act voluntarily. Others suggest, on the basis of his argument against free will, that Hume takes no more than an illusory feature of action to distinguish the experience of performing an act from the experience of merely observing an act. In this paper, I argue that Hume is committed to neither an unduly parsimonious nor a sceptical account of the phenomenology of agency.