CAUSALITY

From Philosopedia

CAUSALITY Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Causation in philosophy deals with the relationship between two events or states of affairs such that the first brings about the second. Flip a switch, and the light comes on. But all events may not have an antecedent cause, and naturalists in philosophy are interested in the quantum theory, which implies that some events occur at random. Rationalists tend to search for a priori principles governing what kind of thing may or cannot cause some other kind of thing. Hume argued that knowledge of causes must come from experience. John Stuart Mill was unable, however, to supply a satisfactory positive account of just what causal connection is. Bertrand Russell subsequently claimed that an advanced scientific understanding of the world needs no such notion. According to Flew, modern analyses regard the need for such a notion “as explicable through the subjunctive conditional ‘If e1 had not occurred, e2 would not have occurred,’ but little is clear about what makes such a remark true.” {Antony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy).