Where Would We Be Without Counterfactuals?

One hundred years ago this Sunday, on November th, , Bertrand Russell delivered the Inaugural Address to the Aristotelian Society’s thirty-fourth session – it was Russell’s second year as President. His lecture was entitled ‘On the Notion of Cause’, and as the Proceedings here note, a discussion followed in which a number of members took part. Outside the Aristotelian Society, the discussion continues to this day: Russell’s paper remains both in uential and controversial. And it is widely known as the source of one of the most famous lines in twentieth century philosophy: “e law of causation”, Russell declares, “Like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like themonarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.” As it happens, this is the one piece of Russell’s entire philosophical output with which my own work connects directly – certainly the only one where I make any claim to advancing the matters under discussion. So I want to take advantage of this happy coincidence to use my own Inaugural Lecture, to the chair that now bears Russell’s name, to celebrate the centenary of this famous paper; and to talk about what its conclusions look like, with the bene t of a century’s hindsight. It is a story with a lot of Cambridge connections. Indeed, I’m not the rst occupant of this chair to mention Russell’s paper in an inaugural lecture. Anscombe does so in her piece ‘Causality and Determination’, from :