Causation

Without cause and effect, there would be no science or technology, no moral responsibility, and no system of law. Causation is therefore the most fundamental connection in the universe and a core topic of philosophical thought. This Very Short Introduction introduces all of the main theories of causation and its key debates.

Stephen Mumford is Professor of Metaphysics at the Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He has written several books on this topic, including Dispositions (OUP, 1998), Laws in Nature (Routledge, 2004), Getting Causes from Powers (with Rani Lill Anjum, OUP, 2011), and Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2012).
Rani Lill Anjum is Research Fellow at the Norwegian University of Life Science where she leads the Causation in Science research project (CauSci). CauSci is a global network for those interested in a scientifically informed philosophy of causation. She has written many popular articles in magazines and newspapers and delivered numerous talks for non-specialist audiences. She is the co-author of Getting Causes from Powers (OUP, 2011).

- Introduction: why causation?
- 1: The problem, or: what's the matter with causation?
- 2: Regularity, or: causation without connection?
- 3: Time and space, or: do causes occur before their effects?
- 4: Necessity, or: do causes guarantee their effects?
- 5: Counterfactual dependence, or: do causes make a difference?
- 6: Physicalism, or: is it all transference?
- 7: Pluralism, or: is causation many different things?
- 8: Primitivism, or: is causation the most basic thing?
- 9: Dispositionalism, or: what tends to be?
- 10: Finding causes, or: where are they?
- A very short afterword
- Further reading
- Index