Thought: A Journal of Philosophy

Volume 4, Issue 3, September 2015

Ryan Wasserman
Pages 141-150

Lewis on Backward Causation

David Lewis famously defends a counterfactual theory of causation and a non-causal, similarity-based theory of counterfactuals. Lewis also famously defends the possibility of backward causation. I argue that this combination of views is untenable—given the possibility of backward causation, one ought to reject Lewis’s theories of causation and counterfactuals.