Causality (from Latin causa, which renders the Greek aitía) — The relation by which one event, thing or state (the cause) produces, explains or determines another (the effect). The philosophical problem is what this relation is and what justifies our belief in it. In Aristotle (Physics II.3; Metaphysics V.2), “cause” has a broad, explanatory sense and is said in four ways: material (what something is made of), formal (its essence or definition), efficient (the source of change) and final (that for the sake of which something happens). Modern science concentrated on efficient causation. For David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739–1740; An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 1748), observation reveals only succession and constant conjunction between events, never a “necessary connection”; the idea of necessity arises from the mind’s habit of expecting the effect after the cause. Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), in the Second Analogy of Experience, replies that causality is a category of the understanding, a condition for ordering events in time, and not a mere empirical generalization. In the twentieth century Bertrand Russell, in “On the Notion of Cause” (1912), proposed that physics can do without the concept, while David Lewis (1973) analyzed causation through counterfactual conditionals and possible worlds. Neighboring issues include the distinction between cause and reason, mental causation, and the relation to determinism and empiricism.
See also: Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Russell, David Lewis.
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