Week five Causation

1. Causal notions
(1) are pervasive in human life: human agency and responsibility; the cement if the universe.
(2) Seem unproblematic until Hume
(3) Involve modality—causal necessity
2. Skepticism
(1) Russellian—the notion of a cause has no place in fundamental sciences
(2) Humean—no empirical evidence for causation as necessary connection
(3) Responses
3. Preliminaries for a metaphysics of causation
(1) Causal relata
(a) Three questions concerning their category, number, and role
(b) The standard view: events, 2, cause and effect
(c) Other views
(2) The general template for an account: c causes e iff, -----.
(3) Reductive vs. non-reductive account
4. Reductive Theories
（1） Regularity theories
(a) Simple regularity—Hume’s constant conjunction, for example
(b) Nomic regularity—the regularity is backed by laws of nature.
（2） Counterfactual dependence—David Lewis’s influential theory. A little bit about the
semantics of counterfactuals.
（3） probabilistic
5. Non-reductive theories
（1） Primitivism: the concept of causation is unanalyzable. Causal facts cannot be reduced
to any non-causal facts.
（2） manipulation
（3） powerism
6. Concluding remarks