Aspect causation
Journal of Philosophy 97 (4):235-256 (2000)
| Abstract | While skiing, Suzy falls and breaks her right wrist. The next day, she writes a philosophy paper. Her right wrist is broken, so she writes her paper using her left hand. (Assume, as seems plausible, that she isn’t dexterous enough to write it any other way, e.g., with her right foot.) She writes the paper, sends it off to a journal, and it is subsequently published. Is Suzy’s accident a cause of the publication of the paper?2 Of course not. Below, I will show that none of the major contenders for a theory of events coupled with a theory of causation succeeds against examples like that of Suzy’s accident, and that the reason for this derives from an underlying tension between our beliefs about events and our goals for theories of causation. I will then argue that property instances should be taken, in the first instance, as the causal relata, and propose an analysis of causation that I call aspect causation. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,631 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesStephen Mumford & Rani Lill Anjum (2009). Double Prevention and Powers. Journal of Critical Realism 8 (3):277-293.
Joseph A. Baltimore (2011). Lewis' Modal Realism and Absence Causation. Metaphysica 12 (2):117-124.
Menno Hulswit (2005). How Causal is Downward Causation? Journal for General Philosophy of Science 36 (2):261 - 287.
D. Benjamin Barros (2013). Negative Causation in Causal and Mechanistic Explanation. Synthese 190 (3):449-469.
Richard Otte (1987). Indeterminism, Counterfactuals, and Causation. Philosophy of Science 54 (1):45-62.
Jig-Chuen Lee (1986). Causal Condition, Causal Asymmetry, and the Counterfactual Analysis of Causation. Synthese 67 (2):213 - 223.
Johannes Persson (1999). The Determinables of Explanatory Mechanisms. Synthese 120 (1):77-87.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads33 ( #36,464 of 548,973 )Recent downloads (6 months)2 ( #37,438 of 548,973 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
