Causation and counterfactuals / edited by John Collins, Ned Hall, and L.A. Paul.

"A Bradford book."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 459-467) and indexes.

Counterfactuals and causation : history, problems, and prospects / John Collins, Ned Hall, and L.A. Paul -- Trumping preemption / Jonathan Schaffer -- Causation as influence / David Lewis -- Preemptive prevention / John Collins -- Advertisement for a sketch of an outline of a prototheory of causation / Stephen Yablo -- Difference-making in context / Peter Menzies -- Causation and the price of transitivity / Ned Hall -- Aspect causation / L.A. Paul -- Two concepts of causation / Ned Hall -- Void and object / David Lewis -- Causing and nothingness / Helen Beebee -- For facts as causes and effects / D.H. Mellor -- Preempting preemption / David Coady -- Causes, contrasts, and the nontransitivity of causation / Cei Maslen -- Causation : probabilistic and counterfactual analyses / Igal Kvart -- A counterfactual analysis of indeterministic causation / Murali Ramachandran -- Do all and only causes raise the probabilities of effects? / Christopher Hitchcock -- Causation, counterfactuals, and the third factor / Tim Maudlin -- Going through the open door again : counterfactual versus singularist theories of causation / D.M Armstrong.

Print version record.

One philosophical approach to causation sees counterfactual dependence as the key to the explanation of causal facts: for example, events c (the cause) and e (the effect) both occur, but had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. The counterfactual analysis of causation became a focus of philosophical debate after the 1973 publication of the late David Lewis's groundbreaking paper, "Causation," which argues against the previously accepted "regularity" analysis and in favor of what he called the "promising alternative" of the counterfactual analysis. Thirty years after Lewis's paper, this book brings together some of the most important recent work connecting--or, in some cases, disputing the connection between--counterfactuals and causation, including the complete version of Lewis's Whitehead lectures, "Causation as Influence," a major reworking of his original paper. Also included is a more recent essay by Lewis, "Void and Object," on causation by omission. Several of the essays first appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Philosophy, but most, including the unabridged version of "Causation as Influence," are published for the first time or in updated forms. Other topics considered include the "trumping" of one event over another in determining causation; de facto dependence; challenges to the transitivity of causation; the possibility that entities other than events are the fundamental causal relata; the distinction between dependence and production in accounts of causation; the distinction between causation and causal explanation; the context-dependence of causation; probabilistic analyses of causation; and a singularist theory of causation.

eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - Worldwide