السببية: مقدمة شديدة الاختصار

Very Short Introductions #371

by Stephen Mumford

قد تثير السَّببيَّة قلق المُبتدِئ؛ بسبب طبيعتها النظريَّة والفنيَّة، شأنها في ذلك شأن العديد من مجالات الفلسفة، ومع أنّ الكثير من الأفكار الأساسيَّة، والمفاهيم، والأسئلة المتعلقة بالسَّببيَّة تمتاز بالبساطة، فإننا نرمي إلى شرح المسائل الرئيسة المرتبطة بها، وإذا لم نتبنَّ إحدى النظريَّات المرتبطة بالسَّببيَّة، فلن نتمكن من البحث أوالخوض في ماهيَّتها، وعليه، إذا تمكَّن أحدنا من تطوير نظريَّته السَّببيَّة وتحديثها فسيكون قادرًا على اكتشاف الأسباب، وقد يكون هذا الأمر حيويًّا، وضروريًّا؛ فعلى سبيل المثال: لا بدَّ من تحديد أسباب أمراض مُعيَّنة، لنتمكَّن من توفير الأدوية التي تسهم في الشفاء من تلك الأمراض؛ ولن يكون بمقدورنا السَّيطرة على التغيُّر المناخيِّ إلا عندما نفهم مُسبِّباته، وينبغي لنا أن نُحدِّد الأسباب جميعَها التي تؤدِّي إلى نشوب الحروب، وولادة الفقر والمعاناة، والألم، ونتجنَّبها بتوفير أسباب الاستقرار، والسَّلام، والازدهار.

ولكن كيف من المُمْكن أنْ نجعل هذه الآمال، والطُموحات حقيقة على أرض الواقع إذا لم نَعِ طبيعة العَلاقة السَّببيَّة بين الأشياء؟ من يريد الحصول على الإجابة، فلا شكَّ أنَّ هذا هو الكتاب الأنسب لذلك ، ولا شكَّ في أنَّ الجميع معنيٌّ ومهتم بتلك التسؤلات.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Metaphysics, Reference, Physics

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 2013

Reviews

[Tso William · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sustained discourse on a relatively obscure aspect of philosophy. Causation is often taken for granted in many philosophical problem. One popular hypothetical example in ethics, for instance, is about pushing a man (or yourself), thereby sacrificing a life, to stop a train from crashing or falling, saving many more lives inside the train. Now it is assumed that this act of pushing can save the people. In legalistic terms, but for you , the train will crash and people die. It is a little anti-climax to say that even if you push yourself onto the rail, the train will crash and people inside will all die. In other words, there is no counter-factual dependence . With or without your sacrifice, the result is the same anyway.

In this very short introduction, the starting point is Hume's view of causation which sees everything as merely succession of events. What is seen as causation is only when two events chance to happen often. From this vintage, various theories of causation are explained and explored. Causation is when there is counter-factual dependence or it can be a matter of energy transfer ( physicalism ) or a combination of all of the above (pluralism ). Perhaps it can't be explained as it is so basic and fundamental ( primitivism ). Alternatively, there is no definitive answer because it depends on the tendency of matter and is therefore a matter of probability ( dispositionalism )

This is an interesting introduction because causation permeates in almost every branches of philosophy. I also recommend Stephen Mumford's book on metaphysics in the very short introduction series, which is similarly engaging and stimulating.

[Bojan Tunguz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Causation sounds like one of those super obscure philosophical terms. However, it refers to the simple idea that events in the real world cause other events. It’s a very primitive and intuitive notion, on par with our notions of space and time. And just as it turns out that our simple ideas about space and time belie a much more complicated reality, so it is that a closer look at the notion of causation leads to some puzzling and even troubling questions.

“Causation: A Very Short Introduction” aims to take the reader on a tour of some of the most interesting ideas about causation that have cropped up over the history of philosophy. It is a short book, but it is by no means a quick read. As it often happens when trying to untangle apparently uniform threads a lot of exactitude and precision need to be applied, which in turn requires a high level of mental dexterity and patience. This book is not an easy read, and I would only recommend it to readers who appreciate tightly argued philosophical ideas and are willing to invest the time and effort required for their full comprehension.

The book presents several main ideas and schools of thought that have been built in order to answer the question of what exactly we mean by causation. The authors show that most of those ideas, even though they seem very counterintuitive on the surface, have many attractive features that make them hard to dismiss out hand, or at all. However, the book argues that no single school of though so far has managed to capture all of our intuitive ideas about causation.

Personally, as a theoretical Physicist, I would have liked it if this book covered the “Physicalist” view of causation (or “causality” as we like to call it) in more depth. I think that this book’s ideas about physical reductionism are a bit too glib and don’t quite capture the full complexity of this approach.

Worrying about causation is not just an exercise in navel gazing. Finding and understanding causal connection deeply affects science, law, and medicine, to name just a few examples through which we are affected on a daily basis. If you would like to take a probing tour of what causation may mean in and of itself, then this short book is a good place to start. But be fully prepared to grease your intellectual elbows, as reading this small tome can be quite a mental exercise.

[Alessandro Piovaccari · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good (but incomplete) introduction

The biggest lacking when talking about physics is that only example of conservative systems are presented, in which time is by definition time can be reversed. Example from thermodynamics and in particular about irreversible system could be more suited to talk about causation. In particular, the concept of entropy and further of information, and their change and transfer as the system evolves, could be very useful to explain causation.

[Alfie Grocott · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid introduction to the subject. Laid it all out pretty clearly, but I would have liked a proper conclusion just to whip through everything again.

[Cameron Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of the philosophy literature on causation. Well-written.

I decided to read this book because I had just read "Black Swan," where the author argues that the discipline of history is a "fraud." He argues that many historical causal claims of the form "the assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused WWI" or "the Great Recession was caused by a financial crisis, which was caused by the securitization and reckless transferring of the risk of subprime mortgages" are inadequately supported and likely wrong. Historical claims of this kind, he says, are not subject to empirical testing, and when historians make them, they're just picking somewhat arbitarily from the many different possible ways that a historical event may have been caused, often on the grounds that the chosen causal explanation creates a good-sounding "narrative." This got me wondering what we really mean when we say something like "the assassination of Franz Ferninand caused WWI."

After reading this book on causation, I think I have a better sense. Interestingly, in the end, I think the philosophical literature (or at least the view I came out of this book with) ends up somewhere similar to the US legal system's approach to causation. Causation is not as simple as counterfactual dependence/but-for causation. That is, to say that the assassination of Franz Ferninand caused WWI is not simply to say that WWI would not have happened had Franz Ferninand not been assassinated. It's also definitely not the case that a cause has to be sufficient for an effect, e.g., Germany also needed to exist in order for WWI to happen, so Franz Ferdinand's assassination wasn't sufficient. The book talks about Judea Pearl's idea of a sort of causal graph showing factors that all contribute to an effect or event. Changing some of those factors slightly can sometimes change the result. The book also introduced the very appealing Wittgensteinian/pluralist idea that causation doesn't have a single essence. Instead, conceptually, it's more of a family resemblance or can take many different forms. And combining those two ideas together, my view is that causation can refer to several different roles that a factor might play in a causal graph. For example, to say that Franz Ferdinand's assassination caused WWI is to say that Franz Ferdinand's assassination "ignited" WWI because in the causal map it was right behind the start of WWI. We might also say that Germany's ambitions to expand across Europe caused WWI not only in a "but-for" sense, but also in the sense that, even if you hypothetically changed a lot of the other factors/inputs in the causal map, the effect would still happen in a lot of possible worlds (e.g. even if Franz Ferninand was never assassinated, WWI still would have happened in a lot of possible worlds, because Germany had such ambitions to expand that the war would have started in some other way). In that sense, to say that Germany's ambition caused WWI is to say that it played a significant enough role in the causal graph leading to WWI. (This explains why, contrary to the author of Black Swan, doing history is useful, since it can allow us to identify social conditions that in this sense tend to cause good or bad outcomes, even if there's not a strict necessary or sufficient relationship.) Also, as I said earlier, this is similar to what the US legal system says about causation. "But-for" causation is a common definition of causation in the law, but usually something further is required for causation to be satisfied (e.g. proximate causation, which is somewhat similar to the idea that the putative cause must play a significant enough or direct enough role in the causal graph). And the law also recognizes that even where there is not a but-for relationship, causation sometimes may still be satisfied (e.g. when there are multiple tortfeasors each of whose conduct was sufficient to have caused a plaintiff's injury and thus none of them was individually necessary for the injury to occur).

While this might be somewhat of an answer to the conceptual question of what we mean when say one event caused another, I'm still confused about the metaphysical question of what causation really is. I'm also a little unclear of how separate those questions really are. I guess my only criticism of this book is that it could have distinguished those two questions and explained their relationship a little more clearly.

[Evan Streeby]

I can’t rate this because it’s my first journey into this subject (how I have a degree in philosophy while managing to neglect this? I can’t answer). It seemed awfully well-informed, however, and the writing was good as far as this very short intro series is concerned.

[Yuganka Sharan · Rating 4 out of 5]

To lead or not to lead, is that causation?

Causation is one of the fundamental forces that forms the very bedrock of reality and how we experience the world. Without causation, knowledge would be impossible as we would have no way to link any one thing with another – every object and event would have had a separate existence independent of other objects and events; inference, logic, reason – every scientific edifice would crumble. It’s hard to imagine how we could have even existed then – eating food, reproducing, saving oneself from physical and mental harm, nothing would have mattered.

Wrapping one’s head around such concepts is especially difficult as they are never directly observed. This is what Hume said, that our sense of causation is nothing but an intuitively developed concept formed by seeing a given combination of events multiple times – causation has no metaphysical existence, but is only a psychological artefact of expectation within us. Causation, he said, is an illusion.

With this background, Mumford and Anjum begin their book on causation.

In the chapters that follow, some of the common ideas associated with causation are taken up – that causes precede effects, that they are near in space and time, that they always occur together and the like. At a first glance, all these are indeed the kinds of properties and relationships we expect between causes and effects.

But lo and behold! It turns out each and every one of these properties that we relate with causation is flawed as, one by one, the authors start dismantling our notions regarding this concept.

But perhaps the more difficult part was to come up with replacements to form the new foundations of the crumpled and crumbled edifice. In the past few decades, some new theories of causation have entered into the scene and the authors then go on to expound the positives and negatives of those. Some theories, like pluralism which says that causation comprises of a combination of different things which depend on the specific event, or primitivism which says causation is an un-analysable event, a sort of metaphysical atom, tantamount to accepting defeat in the quest to understand causation, whereas others, like dispositionalism which talks about the “tendency” of one thing to lead to another, stand on relatively stronger grounds. Yet, at present, there is not a single theory that manages to explain causation in its various forms.

Does causation imply necessity? But then not every match strike leads to a spark as there are extra factors like wind and wetness of the match head that we forget to take into account. Does causation imply a change from what could have been (an elk on the railway track causes the train to stop and get late; but its presence wouldn’t matter if there was also a red signal), or can causation also exist in things that don’t happen (a medicine stops the onset of a disease, so did it cause nothing?) – questions like these keep the readers occupied, and by the end of the book, short thought experiments such as these help to extract the main components of the concept of causation that one might have.

A statement like “causes precede effects” is seen as being axiomatic. And yet, it is incorrect. Causes and effects exist simultaneously. Let’s take a sugar cube dissolving in water, for instance. If the cause is “sugar coming into contact with water” and the effect is “sugar dissolving in water”, then, the authors say, all the considerations of how the sugar cube and glass of water came to be together, and how someone picked up the sugar cube and put it in the water, are irrelevant from a causation point of view. The sugar cube will only dissolve when it is in contact with water. The effect can only simultaneously exist with the cause.

Causes do not precede effects. This was one of the results that really surprised me. And that is the beauty of reading such books. You realise that there are cracks in the very foundations of your knowledge. It is one thing to not know what causes X, but an entirely different thing to not even know what causation itself really is. It opens up one’s mind to the possibility of other such cracks in one’s conception of the world, and that is enlightening.

If reading the previous nine paragraphs makes you have a re-look at your concept of causation, I wouldn’t think twice before saying it may as well have caused it.

[Stone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do we know that it works? Yes.
Do we know how it works? Kind of.
Do we know why it works? No.

Notes:

Reductive Strategy
Eliminative Strategy
Direction of Causation
Hume (Regularity, Temporal priority & Contiguity, Necessity)
Induction 
Singularist 
Kant (Simultaneous causation (not instantaneously))
John Mackie (multiple cause)
Determinism
Subtractive Interference (missing)
Additive Interference (jammed)
Probabilistic Cause
Counterfactual Dependence (had it not been x)
John Locke (real essence)
Corpuscularians (Macro caused by Micro. VS Atomism *not in this book*)
Physical transfer theory
Agnostic (no bottom)
Emergentism
Pluralist (diversity)
Wittgenstein (Family resemblance concept)
Imposter
Primitivism (fundamental but unanalysable)
Dispositionalist (own causal power)
Absence (or Nothingness)
Propensity theory (single case strength)
Proprioception


Wows:
We saw this in the case of an elk on the rail producing a train delay even though a signal was also stuck at red. Arguably the elk made no difference to the outcome but it did produce it. Similarly, when a firing squad of seven each fires into a hostage, we could say of each individual bullet that it produces the victim’s death even though it makes no difference. Had one bullet not hit, six others did the job anyway.

Multiple Cause
John Mackie (1917–81) noted that for almost every effect, there could be multiple causes at work. Suppose someone drops a cigarette in a house, which subsequently burns down. The house is unlikely to have burnt down just from the dropping of the cigarette. It also needed the presence of flammable materials, such as furniture, and plenty of oxygen so that the flame could take hold. The dropped cigarette was not sufficient on its own to cause the fire but it certainly was an essential part of the whole cause of it. In other words, there would not have been a fire without the cigarette.

Additive Interference
In the second kind of case, we leave all parts of the machine intact but now we add some further element. Perhaps the cog in the machine gets covered in dust, which causes it to jam. Again the machine fails: not because something has been taken away but because something has been added. We will call this additive interference.

Primitivism
If there is infinite complexity in the world, all the way down, then nothing would be basic after all. But we don’t know for sure that this is true. And perhaps there is a level of nature that is as simple as we are capable of knowing. That might do for a relative primitivism about causation. It could be at least as simple as anything else we know, even if there is hidden complexity within it. The point is, however, that some primitivisms will probably be right, so there is nothing that is obviously wrong about making a primitivist move. It ought at least to be an option.

There are some other difficult conceptual matters that the reductionist position has to face. One is that, for all we know, there might not be a bottom level in nature. As a matter of sheer philosophical principle, there is no reason why there has to be a very bottom level in the world, upon which everything rests. And just as we cannot know there to be a bottom level through our reasoning, nor is it the sort of thing that we could know from the evidence of the senses. The problem is that while we could know something is complex, by seeing that it has parts, we could never know that something is simple. It might after all have hidden parts that we have not yet detected. 

Absence (or Nothingness)
Could the absent water have a power to kill your plant? That doesn’t sound right. The absent water isn’t anything at all, so how could it be causally powerful? There is one test of what it is to be real—the so-called Eleatic test—which tells us that to be real is to be causally powerful. If one took this line on absences being powerful, one would then be obliged to treat absences as part of reality.

Emergentism
There may be something about emergent phenomena that thus will not allow, even in principle, an explanation at a lower level. There are some forms of emergentism that are anti-physicalist. Some are emergentists about the mind and mental phenomena, for instance. On this view, mind would be non-physical and non-physically explicable. But another form of emergentism would be simply that higher-level physical things are not mere sums of lower-level physical things and not explicable in terms of them. Instead, the higher-level phenomena could be indivisible wholes. Holism is a term that could be used for this veiw.

The cuckoo clock is like this. But in other cases, when some of the parts come together to form a whole, they interact and change each other. Chemical composition sometimes exhibits this kind of change. When two elements come together to bond, doing so affects the chemical properties of the constituents so that the whole has a very different set of properties. Both sodium and chlorine are dangerous and harmful, for instance, but when they are chemically bonded in a certain proportion, they form sodium chloride:common salt. 

What it suggests is that there are certain higher-level phenomena that have to be treated holistically. They could be indivisible unities in the sense that to take them apart is to lose the causal role possessed by the whole. In that case, causation could occur at the level of the whole.

Tractatus (Solipsism)*not in this book*
One might, for instance, say additionally that the idea or belief has to resemble or correspond to that which is perceived.

Our perception of the world is at the basis of everything we can possibly know. If the very possibility of any empirical knowledge rests upon there being causal connections between the world and our perception of it, then causation turns out to be the most fundamental thing of all.

But there is yet another question in relation to perception. Is causation something that we can know about directly or is knowledge of it something that is inferred from perceptions of other things? There is a very good reason to ask this question. Some ideas are primitive. But for them to be so, the empiricist requires that they be experienced directly. Such ideas have not been generated from other ideas, so the idea must have been acquired immediately.

Proprioception
The philosopher might observe the game of billiards and the scientist might just record the correlations, neither of them interfering with what they see. Indeed, any experimenter has to make sure they don’t influence the outcome. But, of course, they could. We are not apart from the causal world. We are very much a part of it. We are causal agents: we initiate causation and our actions have effects. We are also causal patients: things are done causally to us. We are therefore both causally active and passive. Just like everything else, we have no escape from the causal web of the world.

Now given that we are able to cause things, might this be a place in which the causal primitivist could find some direct experience of causation? Arguably so. When you lift a heavy suitcase, for instance, you feel a strain in your muscles. You perhaps feel that it needs even more effort to succeed. The aching in your arm increases as you try harder but eventually the suitcase is lifted. You are the causal agent in relation to the lifting of the case and you feel the work being done, immediately in your body.

[Manuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This little book packs a lot of information in! Unlike with his other short introduction (to Metaphysics), Mumford didn't try to spice things up for newcomers to the subject. Instead, we are treated to a long, serious, but extremely interesting discussion about what counts as causation, what causation is in itself, and how we may find instances of it. I applaud the author for giving us something other than just Humeanism or Lewisianism. I never understood why so many academic philosophers give such credence to Lewis' possible-worlds approach to causation; the most convoluted attempt at a philosophical analysis, if there ever was one. Mumford's preferred approach (if I understood correctly) is for an analysis that returns us to objects, away from events, and makes use of old-fashioned concepts that are all but forgotten, like disposition, hidden power, and potentiality. I also applaud the author for giving Aristotle a chance and not dismissing him out of hand, under the assumption that early science definitively disproved his theory of the 4 causes. This book is very accessible to anyone interested in this thorny philosophical issue: the curious, the amateur, and even the professional. It reads like one long intelligent conversation, and the jargon is kept to a minimum... like all good philosophical literature ought to be.

[Jason Zimmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice summation of classical conceptions of causation, with a particular focus on Hume, regularity, necessity, counterfactuals, physicalism, and primitivism. Really solid introduction for those interested.

[Eddie Hammond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite a philisophically technical book, and without as much emphasis on what causation is in the scientific world (analysis of 2nd law thermodynamics and arrow of time not included). Despite this very interesting.

[Morticia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short but very good introduction, I'm looking forward to reading more by Mumford.

[Dr. Tathagat Varma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Popper famously said all life is problem solving. And #problemsolving is all about understanding various moving parts and their relationships. For example - would adding a new feature be more valuable to customers or improving the page load speed? should we structure the compensation as 100% fixed or create a variable component? if we lowered the prices, would that lead to more profits? and so on. Of course, life would be so easy if we understood the degree of correlation between 'x' and 'y', but what is not always very obvious that the correlation might as well as spurious! The famous example comes to mind - eating chocolates leads to Nobel prizes! Needless to say, a decision made on an incorrect cause-effect relationship might be wasted time, effort, money and probably tons of missed opportunities! It is critical to understand causal relationships.

So, how do we improve our understanding about #causalinference? I think we need to start with teaching students to ask right questions. For example, 2+2=4 might be a right answer, but 4=2+2? might be a wrong question! Sadly, we reward them on right answers, when we should be teaching them how to ask right questions!

[RJTK · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book to help me get started with writing an introduction to my master's thesis, which was nominally about some mathematical aspects of a certain theory of causation. I found it very informative -- it is surprising how much nuance there is in what seems to be a totally natural and intuitive concept.

To get a sense of what the book covers, consider the following three statements: "pushing on my coffee cup caused it to fall off my desk", "I stood in the middle of the road, causing cars to stop", "smoking causes lung cancer". Each of these sentences use the word "cause" but what is it really that connects them together? Is the second not a complex sequence of decisions made by an independent agent with free-will while the first is simple physics? And what of the last sentence -- there are many smokers who never develop cancer, so how can we say smoking causes it?

A great read overall.

[Arvind · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyable (and dizzyingly circular!) romp through the main philosophical themes of causation. Introduces the popular approaches, but leaves plenty of room to play with the ideas (especially if one engages and peeks into the sources mentioned).

Eurocentric to the boot, of course. Which is a real pity. While I stan Hume and Russell on this particular topic, there are so many long-standing problems which even as a layperson I can see being enriched by (e.g.) Yogācāra approaches to interbeing, causal symmetry, instantaneity and the theory of signs. Instead, non-academic readers today must make do with Kant's ham-fisted attempt to reinvent the wheel 1,200 years later. Still, very stimulating.

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not altogether sure where I stand on the various understandings of causality, but I do know this little volume gave me cause to think.

Part of the joy comes from SM & RLAs brilliant expostulation which could easily be turned to as a guide for how to present complex topics. Again and again the two authors presented some plausible notion of what we mean by causality, always in clear and simple terms, only to cheerfully tear it down with an equally convincing counter argument. It was equal parts enthralling and frustrating, and I loved it.

[Arshed Nabeel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, to me, felt neither very short nor as an introduction. A long and drivelling narrative primarily devoted to the ontological aspects of ‘cause’, and insufficient (in my opinion) treatment of the computational and inferential aspects of causal models and systems make it a rather dry read to a non-philosopher.

[Kiersten Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent, but less interesting than I hoped. The book introduced various schools of thought on causation, but didn’t really follow them through as much as I’d have liked and it wasn’t as sharp/cogent? as I would have liked. I just felt it left a things hazier than they needed to be and a lot of loose threads - more than there needed to be?

[Ralph Quirequire · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book thinking that I'd learn about the concept of causation as how a statistician would think about it. Instead, it gave me something else. This simultaneously delighted and disappointed me for some reason.

[Logan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this

[David Teachout · Rating 5 out of 5]

We act as if we know causation because our lives are invariably caught up in the pragmatic living of being a creature in this universe. Unfortunately, like so many ideas that make intuitive sense, common notions of causation are not so accurate. Mumford does a wonderful job going through the essential philosophical ideas concerning causation, utilizing Hume as a rudder to point out the difficulties in each theory, before finally offering a tentative idea of what may work. Such is the honesty of the criticism throughout that when it comes to his own idea, it doesn't seem inevitable but simply more accurate than the rest. If you're looking for a book that will cause some serious, if being introspectively honest, doubt about assumed ideas, this is certainly a good place to start and by the end the world will become just a little bit clearer.

[Alistair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contents

List of illustrations xiii
Why causation? - 1
1. The problem: what's the matter with causation? - 4
2. Regularity: causation without connection? - 15
3. Time and space: do causes occur before their effects? - 27
4. Necessity: do causes guarantee their effects? - 38
5. Counterfactual dependence: do causes make a difference? - 51
6. Physicalism: is it all transference - 63
7. Pluralism: is causation many different things? - 75
8. Primitivism: is causation the most basic thing? - 85
9. Dispositionalism: what tends to be? - 96
10. Finding causes: where are they? - 109

A very short afterword - 120
Further reading - 121
Index - 125

[Philemon - · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear, sober catalog of seemingly all the philosophical angles and debates to do with causation down the centuries. Since Hume, it's been hard for causation to stand up to close analysis. On the other hand, in practical terms it's too useful to dispense with. Causation thus becomes something sanctioned mainly by practical use. Science tries and almost succeeds in adjudicating what patterns should be considered causally determined, but there's plenty of room for determined skepticism to mount opposition. All of which keeps things lively.

[Antonio Segura]

AVSI books range from bad to great. This one falls somewhere in-between. It's a well-written book, but if you want to be inspired to live differently, this is not for you. If you like philosophy, would like to challenge your thinking about something most of us take for granted, you'll enjoy this book. The book explores what it means, if anything, for one thing to cause another to occur.

[Francisco Quiroga Vergara · Rating 5 out of 5]

It does what it promises: a proper introduction to the philosophy of causation. It explains matters in an uncomplicated manner and supposes no previous knowledge. Having said this, this book will not be a thorough guide for experts.

[Napalmlolita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is missing some important points like all the bizarre ways quantum physics affect causation, and discussion of the anthropic principle that "for us to exist at all the universe needs to be operated by causal laws".

[Mills College Library]

122 M9627 2013

[Sangkug Yi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Standard introduction to the subject of causality

[PUTRI DIANITA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick read on causation

Quite nice for beginners, just as promised by the title... it skimms through the basic concepts and prominent names in the field.