The thesis explores and suggests a solution to a problem that I identify in John McDowell's and Lynne Rudder Baker's approaches to mental and intention-dependent (ID) causation in the physical world. I discuss McDowell's non-reductive and anti-scientistic account of mind and world, which I believe promises to renew and liberate philosophy. Baker's constitution account, I argue, provides a potential link between McDowell's categories of the space of reasons and the realm of law. However, both McDowell and Baker view mental causation as acting unproblematically within the physical world. I argue that this is inconsistent with an understanding of ordinary physical causality as objective, in the sense of being recognition-independent, and as causally complete. I develop an account of what I call manifest physical causation - of objective causal relations in the ordinary world of Wilfrid Sellars's manifest image and its extensions into the special sciences. Manifest physical causation, on my account, is productive, acts through physical mechanisms, and is causally closed. In my view, mental and ID property-instances are not part of the manifest physical causal nexus. I conclude by suggesting a modification of Baker's constitution account, which I call Constituted Causation, whereby higher-level - mental and other ID - causal relations are constituted, in favourable circumstances, by lower-level ones. Causality, I argue, relates property-instances at the same ontological level. ID causal relations belong in their own causal nexus of rational and normative relations, connected to the manifest physical world through constitution, a relation of unity without identity. On Baker's view, the essential properties of constituted entities subsume those of their constituters. Extending this to my account enables us to say that the real cause and explanation of someone's action is that they consciously performed it rather than that certain causal processes occurred at the lower level.

No description available.

This thesis deals with the most prominent accounts of analyzing singular event causation by employing counterfactuals or counterfactual information. The classic counterfactual account of token event causation was proposed in 1973 by the philosopher David Lewis and ruled that an event c is a cause of event e, if and only if there is a chain of counterfactually dependent events between c and e. Apart from facing conceptual problems due to its metaphysical claim to analyze causation 'as such' and to reduce it to counterfactual dependency, this account also produced implausible results: first, it stipulated that token causation is a transitive relation, and second, it could not analyze situations in which an effect is over-determined by various causes, either symmetrically or by one cause pre-empting another one. In 2000, almost three decades later, Judea Pearl, formerly an engineer, formulated a new and highly influential theory of modeling causal dependencies using counterfactual information that, as I argue, neither faces these conceptual problems nor produces these undesired results. This formal theory analyzes causal relationships between token events in a given situation in two steps: first, a causal model describing the relevant mechanisms at work in the situation is constructed, and second, causal relationships between the events featured in the situation are determined relatively to this model. Pearl's definition of causation according to a model is technically complicated, but its underlying rationale is that the decisive property of a cause is to sustain its effect via a certain causal process against possible contingencies, this notion of sustenance embodying an aspect of production and an aspect of counterfactual dependency. This theory of Pearl's was received with great interest in the philosophical community, most importantly by Christopher Hitchcock and James Woodward, who tried to simplify this account while preserving the basic intuition that a cause is linked to its effect by a causal process, in essence a concatenation of the mechanisms at work in the situation, just defining a causal process in a formally simpler way. I describe and employ this simplified account by Hitchcock and Woodward as a graphic introduction to Pearl's theory, because the same basic notions, like the one of a causal model, are defined in a formally more accessible way and the basic problems, like the generation of a causal model, become obvious. I mainly discuss Hitchcock's account, since this is the earlier one, since it is more elaborate, and mainly since it is conceptually in need of clarification. Woodward's account is in essence equivalent to Hitchcock's, given a slightly changed terminology. The core of my thesis consists of a comparison of Pearl's theory with Hitchcock's account. I present four paradigmatic examples, three of which are judged differently by these two theories. In each of these three examples our causal intuition is in accord with the judgment delivered by Pearl's account but contradicts the verdict of Hitchcock's. I draw the conclusion that Hitchcock's project of simplifying Pearl's theory fails in the second step of causal analysis, i.e. in defining causation according to a given model. Building on the lessons learned from this comparison, I offer a slight generalization of Pearl's definition of token causation according to a model, since Pearl's original account has the shortcoming that token causes cannot be exogenous in a model.

This thesis will focus on two accounts of causation - Lewis' and Armstrong's, and their approach to absence causation. Lewis accepts absence causation but suffers from what I call the Multiplicity Problem (MP), where too many absence causes are admitted I show that this problem is solved, by enlarge, by his latest theory of causation - Causation as Influence. This solution is set against competing alternatives to avoid MP by accounting for causation with context, contrast, or by reversing Lewis' counterfactual dependence · relation. I show that my proposed Lewisian solution is still preferable to these alternatives. I then turn to Armstrong, showing that his rejection of absence causation is inconsistent with scientific realism. Treating causation as pseudo causation fails because the genuinepseudo causation distinction is justified by intuition, and absence causation is intuitively genuine. Accounting for absence causation via the principles of truth making for negative truth is also inadequate because it leaves us with an excessive causal relatum - the entire universe. I conclude that Armstrong should accept absence causation.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the intellectual discourse centred on chance and causality focusing on the first half of the twentieth century. The thesis will examine how philosophical ideas attendant on the notions of chance and causality trace a path through surrealist discourse. The thesis will analyse surrealism in relation to notions regarded as the handmaidens of chance: spontaneity, flux, the possible and the arbitrary, as well as explore philosophical issues arising from the semantic field of causation: necessity, determinism, indeterminism, probability, destiny and free will. A major objective of this thesis is to bring the 'two cultures' of art and science (including pseudo-science) under one study. Surrealism therefore, will be analysed via the prism of quantum theory, probability theory, psychoanalysis, dynamic psychiatry, the divinatory arts and metapsychology. The thesis will draw on primary statements relating to chance and causality with special attention to sources either owned or referenced by the surrealists. These statements will provide a springboard from which to select visual documents from surrealism that are in dialogue with the prevailing discourse. One of the key points highlighted by this thesis is that surrealism refuses to give a definitive definition to the nature or laws of either chance or necessity, as to do so would be to turn these notions into absolutes. Instead, surrealism explored the dialectics of chance and necessity. I argue that the ambiguity of chance and necessity evident in surrealism is related to the surrealists' aim to surmount irreconcilable antinomies, an objective which is facilitated by their faith in the laws of dialectical materialism.

Independently of whether dispositions are understood as essential potencies, powers or mere capacities, it has been acknowledged that there is a direct connection between them and causation. Thus, the attention of metaphysicians has recently turned 10 an explanation DJ causal relations based on dispositions. This thesis is a study on the possibility of formulating a dispositional account of causation and about the way such an account can be articulated. I examine two main issues: first, how exactly do dispositional properties participate in causal processes? Second, how exactly is the relation between dispositional properties and their manifestations to be understood? I argue that in order to understand the nature of the participation of dispositional properties in causal processes, we need a distinction between two kinds of dispositional properties, that I will call capacities and dispositions: only by distinguishing between the two can we understand how a dispositional cause is formed. Moreover, I defend the thesis that dispositions necessitate their manifestations .

Causation is an asymmetric relation-if C causes E, then E does not cause C. In this thesis I will argue that 1) two major theories of causation, i.e. the regularity theory and the counterfactual theory, cannot adequately account for causal asymmetry; 2) causal asymmetry consists in the explanatory asymmetry between cause and effect; and 3) generally, the notion of causation is dependent on the notion of explanation, or, in other words, explanation sets a conceptual constraint on causation. In reaching these conclusions, issues about simultaneous causation, backwards causation and absence causation will also be discussed.

This thesis argues that the fundamental issues within the mental causation debate are metaphysical ones. Consequently, it is only with metaphysical clarity, that any clarity can be gained in the mental causation debate. In order to provide a successful theory of mental causation one cannot divorce oneself from metaphysics. Neither can one hope to provide a theory of mental causation that is somehow neutral between the various metaphysical systems. Rather, to be plausible, a theory of mental causation must be based within an independently plausible metaphysical framework. I divide the metaphysical issues that are of importance to the mental causation debate into three broad groups. Firstly, what causation is a relation between. Secondly, what the existence and identity conditions for properties are. Thirdly, what the causal relation is. Part One of this thesis is concerned with the first of these issues. The interpretation of the argument from causal over determination, and the possible responses to it, depend upon what causation is a relation between. A belief to the contrary, has led to implausible theories of mental causation and the misrepresentation of those positions within the mental causation debate that are ontologically serious. Part Two is concerned with property analysis. It is suggested that a plausible analysis of properties reveals that the true contenders within the mental causation debate are psychophysical reductionism on the one hand, and interactive mentalism on the other. Part Three is concerned with the causal relation. It is argued that the mental causation debate is affected by what one understands causation to be. In particular, whether a causal closure principle that is strong enough to allow one to advance physicalism can plausibly be advanced, depends upon the theory of causation in which one is embedding psychophysical causation.

No description available.

Whether there exist causal relations between guns firing and people dying, between pedals pressed and cars accelerating, or between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, is typically taken to be a mind-independent, objective, matter of fact. However, recent contributions to the literature on causation, in particular theories of contrastive causation and causal modelling, have undermined this central causal platitude by relativising causal facts to models or to interests. This thesis flies against the prevailing wind by arguing that we must pay greater attention to which elements of our causal talk vary with context and which elements track genuine features of the world around us. I will argue that once these elements are teased apart we will be in a position to better understand some of the most persistent problems in the philosophy of causation: pre-emption cases, absence causation, failures of transitivity and overdetermination. The result is a naturalist account of causation, concordant with the contextual variability we find in our ordinary causal talk, and parsimonious with respect to the theoretical entities posited.