On Causes

Galen: On antecedent causes

bone chisel. Intriguing in the latter context is the mention of "instrumentists" (organikoi) (e.g. pp. 60ff, 158), whose activities as technicians were sometimes the subject of criticism by medical writers, since, on occasion, their quest to perfect surgical tools seems to have taken precedence over the best interest of the patient. Their inventiveness may, perhaps, be seen, too, in certain par...

On Effects Preceding Their Causes

Research on causes of dyslexia

Research by psychology professor Marcel Just indicates that brain activity not only reflects a child's reading ability, but also sheds light on the effectiveness of reading instruction. In this study, Just and collaborators Ann Meyler and Timothy Keller at Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging teamed up with researchers from Stanford University. Just and his team were interested ...

EVALU ATI ON OF THE CAUSES OF CHOLESTASIS IN INFANTS

During a period of three years from 1996 to 1998, 124 infants (64 male and 60 female) with an age range of 1-6 months (mean age 1.5 months) with cholestasis were studied. Idiopathic neonatal hepatitis was the most common cause of cholestasis, accounting for 48 cases with a rate of 3'8.70% in a total of 124 patients, followed by galactosemia in 29 patients (23.38%) and extrahepatic biliary ...

Causes of causes

When is a cause of a cause of an effect also a cause of that effect? The right answer is either “Sometimes” or “Always”. In favour of “Always”, transitivity is considered by some to be necessary for distinguishing causes from redundant noncausal events. Moreover transitivity may be motivated by an interest in an unselective notion of causation, untroubled by principles of invidious discriminati...