Review of Physical Causation, by Phil Dowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
نویسنده
چکیده
Phil Dowe begins Physical Causation by outlining his metaphilosophical stance, distinguishing between the task of analysing our concept of causation, and the task of offering an “empirical analysis” of “what causation in fact is in the actual world” (p.3). Dowe’s energies are to be devoted to the latter task, although he regards the former as also legitimate. Thus he is not restricted by what we mean by ‘causation’, and nor is he obliged to offer more than a contingent account: causation may be different things in different worlds. It is possible for philosophers to perform empirical analysis, so long as their work is informed by scientific results. Dowe does indeed draw upon “hints taken from science” (p.12), although the level of detail here neither greatly constrains his theorising nor makes the book inaccessible to scientifically-hazy metaphysicians.
منابع مشابه
Review of Phil Dowe and Paul Nordhoff: "Cause and Chance: Causation in an Indeterministic World
متن کامل
Causation: Philosophy of Science
1993. McDermott, Michael. "Redundant Causation." British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 40 (1995): 523-544. Mellor, D. H. The Facts of Causation. London: Routledge, 1995. Mellor, D. H. "Fixed Past, Unfixed Future." In Contributions to Philosophy: Michael Dummett, edited by Barry Taylor, 166-186. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1986. Menzies, Peter. "Probabilistic Causation and Causal Processes: A Cr...
متن کاملSome more curious inferences
Good, I. J. 1961. A causal calculus, parts I and II. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 11: 305–18 and 12: 43–51. Lewontin, R. 1974. Analysis of variance and analysis of causes. American Journal of Human Genetics 26: 400–11. Matthen, M. and A. Ariew. 2002. Two ways of thinking about fitness and natural selection. Journal of Philosophy 99: 55–83. Miller, R. 1987. Fact and Method. Prin...
متن کاملCausal feature learning: an overview
Causal feature learning (CFL) (Chalupka et al., Proceedings of the Thirty-First Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. AUAI Press, Edinburgh, pp 181–190, 2015) is a causal inference framework rooted in the language of causal graphical models (Pearl J, Reasoning and inference. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009; Spirtes et al., Causation, Prediction, and Search. Massachus...
متن کاملCommentary: Haldane and beanbag genetics.
References 1 E Mayr. Animal species and evolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. 2 Mayr E. Sympos. Quant. Biol., 24:I, 1959 3 J.B.S. Haldane. Trans. Cambridge Phil. Soc., 23:19, 1924 4 J.B.S. Haldane and S. D. Jayakar. J. Genet., 58:291, 1963 5 R.C. Punnett. J. Hered., 8:464, 1917 6 L.T. Hogben. In: M.P Banton (ed). Darwinism and the study of society. London: Travistock Publ...
متن کامل