Constitution and Causation

Constitutive relevance, mutual manipulability, and fat-handedness

The first part of this paper argues that if Craver’s ([2007a], [2007b]) popular mutual manipulability account (MM) of mechanistic constitution is embedded within Woodward’s ([2003]) interventionist theory of causation—for which it is explicitly designed—it either undermines the mechanistic research paradigm by entailing that there do not exist relationships of constitutive relevance or it gives...

Causation , Physics , and the Constitution of Reality : Russell ’ s

This is an outstanding anthology. It contains extended reflections on Russell’s idea that our notion of causation is a relic of stone-age metaphysics, which fails to fit contemporary physics and thus deserves elimination (‘On the Notion of Cause’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 13, 1913, pp. 1–26). It will be of interest to anyone interested in causation or the physical image of the w...

Coincidence as Overlap

Material constitution and coincidence are widely discussed but poorly understood. This paper is an attempt to make progress by developing an account of how numerically distinct material objects coincide when one constitutes the other. I address two central issues: first, do material coincidents share their proper spatiotemporal parts, and if so, do they share all of them? Second, how can materi...

A Ghazalian Predicament Epistemology and Metaphysics of Causation in the Works of Ghazali

Causation and the Manifestation of Powers

It is widely agreed that many causal relations can be regarded as dependent upon causal relations that are in some way more basic. For example, knocking down the first domino in a row of one hundred dominoes will be the cause of the hundredth domino falling. But this causal relation exists in virtue of the knocking of the first domino causing the falling of the second domino, and so forth. In s...