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Tallis in Wonderland

Causes As (Local) Oomph

Raymond Tallis hunts for the source of causation.

“The law of causation… is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.”
Bertrand Russell, ‘On the Notion of Cause’, in Mysticism and Logic (1918)

It is easy to sympathise with those philosophers who have come to regard causes as, well, a lost cause. The venerable idea that everything that happens is caused to happen by other, distinct and separate, previous happenings – going right back to the First Cause, the mysterious Uncaused Cause (God or the Big Bang according to taste) that got happening to happen – has been under increasing attack for nearly quarter of a millennium. While it has fought back valiantly (mainly by re-defining itself), things are looking pretty bad for the idea of causation.

There are many reasons for this.

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