Theme
Causation
9 philosophers, 3 traditions
What does it mean for one thing to cause another, and is the link between cause and effect necessary? Greek, Indian, Islamic and modern European philosophers disagreed deeply.
What does it mean for one thing to cause another? Aristotle answered that a full explanation names four causes: what a thing is made of, its form, what produced it and what it is for. In India the Buddha taught that suffering arises from causes and conditions and ends when they are removed, and later Buddhists argued over causation itself. Nāgārjuna showed that every account of how cause and effect relate breaks down if both are taken to have natures of their own, while Dharmakīrti made the power to cause the very mark of what is real.
In the Islamic world Avicenna treated an efficient cause as something that gives existence, not only motion, and explained the whole world as a flow of existence from God. Al-Ghazālī answered that the connection between what we call a cause and its effect is not necessary at all, but rests on God’s decision, so the miracles reported in the Qur’an are possible.
Hume found that experience never shows us a necessary connection, only one kind of thing following another. Kant replied that causality is a concept the understanding brings to experience, which is why it holds necessarily of everything we can experience. Philosophers still debate what causation consists in: regular succession, dependence of one event on another, or something more.
Through time
5th century BCE
The Buddha
Suffering has causes and conditions, so if those causes cease, future suffering can be prevented. Tradition sets out the chain as twelve links running from ignorance to old age, disease and death, though scholars regard the twelvefold list as a later compilation.
4th century BCE
Aristotle
To explain something fully is to give its four causes: the material it is made from, its form, the efficient cause that brings it about, and its final cause, the end it serves. Not everything has all four, but where they apply, citing them all is what an adequate explanation requires.
About 500 years later
2nd century CE
Nāgārjuna
Things cannot come about from themselves, from other things, from both or from neither. He did not conclude that nothing causes anything, but that our idea of causation rests on a false assumption: that cause and effect are independent things with natures of their own, existing apart from the mind.
Drew on The Buddha
About 400 years later
7th century CE
Dharmakīrti
To be real is to have causal powers. Real things last only a single moment, each a new entity, and occupy one place and time with a single nature. A universal, which seems to be shared by many things at different times and places, is therefore unreal: at most a fiction needed for thought and language.
About 400 years later
11th century
Avicenna
In metaphysics an efficient cause is a cause of existence, not merely of motion. Forms in our world come from the Agent Intellect, the “giver of forms”, while natural processes prepare matter to receive them, and the whole order of causes is a flow of existence from God.
Drew on Aristotle
al-Ghazali
What we habitually call a cause is not necessarily linked to what we call its effect: either could exist without the other. Their connection comes from God, who creates them side by side by a prior decision. He pressed the point so that the philosophers would have to admit that the miracles in the Qur’an are possible.
Drew on and argued against Avicenna
About 700 years later
18th century
David Hume
Our idea of causation includes contiguity, priority in time and, above all, necessary connection. But no single case shows us a necessary connection, and repetition adds nothing new to the objects; we learn what causes what only from experience. Scholars still debate whether he denied objective necessity altogether.
Immanuel Kant
Experience shows how things usually follow one another, never that a sequence is necessary. Causality is a category, a concept the understanding supplies a priori; it holds necessarily, but only within possible experience. This was his “complete solution of the Humean problem”.
Drew on and argued against David Hume
19th century
Mary Shepherd
Causes necessarily produce their effects, and exist together with them. Against Hume, nothing can begin to exist without a cause, and we know this by reason, not by habit; like causes must have like effects.
Argued against David Hume
Sources
- Alex Broadbent, Causation, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Graham White, Medieval Theories of Causation, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy