Online research in philosophy

In the philosophical tradition, the notions of determinism and causality are strongly linked: it is assumed that in a world of deterministic laws, causality may be said to reign supreme; and in any world where the causality is strong enough, determinism must hold. I will show that these alleged linkages are based on mistakes, and in fact get things almost completely wrong. In a deterministic world that is anything like ours, there is no room for genuine causation. Though there may be stable enough macro-level regularities to serve the purposes of human agents, the sense of “causality” that can be maintained is one that will at best satisfy Humeans and pragmatists, not causal fundamentalists.

By considering the developmental, phenomenological and biological aspects linking mind and causality, this volume offers a state-of-the art theoretical...

The book tackles these questions as well as others concerning the use of causality in the sciences.

This chapter provides an overview of a range of probabilistic theories of causality, including those of Reichenbach, Good and Suppes, and the contemporary causal net approach. It discusses two key problems for probabilistic accounts: counterexamples to these theories and their failure to account for the relationship between causality and mechanisms. It is argued that to overcome the problems, an epistemic theory of causality is required.

After introducing a range of mechanistic theories of causality and some of the problems they face, I argue that while there is a decisive case against a purely mechanistic analysis, a viable theory of causality must incorporate mechanisms as an ingredient. I describe one way of providing an analysis of causality which reaps the rewards of the mechanistic approach without succumbing to its pitfalls.

After the problems of epistemology, the most fundamental problem of Islamic philosophy is that of causality. Causality has been studied from various perspectives. This paper endeavors first to analyze the issues of causality in Islamic philosophy and then to critique them. A sketch is provided of the history of the development of theories of causality in Islamic philosophy, with particular attention to how religious considerations came to determine the shape of the philosophical theories that were accepted. It is suggested that outstanding philosophical and theological problems that have plagued the tradition of Islamic philosophy require a new approach to the issue of causality.

We present in this article a new logical system inspired from linear logic. This system is designed in order to express causality and dynamism. The cut elimination theorem holds for this logic. Examples of applications are given.