Kant's theory of causation and its eighteenth-century German background

Philosophical Review 119 (4):565-591 (2010)
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Abstract

This critical notice highlights the important contributions that Eric Watkins's writings have made to our understanding of theories about causation developed in eighteenth-century German philosophy and by Kant in particular. Watkins provides a convincing argument that central to Kant's theory of causation is the notion of a real ground or causal power that is non-Humean (since it doesn't reduce to regularities or counterfactual dependencies among events or states) and non-Leibnizean because it doesn't reduce to logical or conceptual relations. However, we raise questions about Watkins's more specific claims that Kant completely rejects a model on which the first relatum of a phenomenal causal relation is an event and that he maintains that real grounds are metaphysically and not just epistemically indeterminate.

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Author Profiles

Derk Pereboom
Cornell University
Andrew Chignell
Princeton University

Citations of this work

Kant on Reason as the Capacity for Comprehension.Karl Schafer - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):844-862.

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References found in this work

Causality and properties.Sydney Shoemaker - 1980 - In Peter van Inwagen (ed.), Time and Cause. D. Reidel. pp. 109-35.
Causality and Properties.Sydney Shoemaker - 1980 - In Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas (eds.), Metaphysics: A Guide and Anthology. Oxford University Press.
Kant.Allen W. Wood - 2004 - Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
The metaphysics of causation.Jonathan N. D. Schaffer - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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