What to Do When You Encounter Funky Causes in the (Historical) Wild

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 2025
Host editors
  • P. Illari
  • F. Russo
Book title The Routledge Handbook of Causality and Causal Methods
ISBN
  • 9781032260198
  • 9781032262871
ISBN (electronic)
  • 9781003528937
Series Routledge handbooks in philosophy
Chapter 45
Pages (from-to) 614-623
Number of pages 10
Publisher New York: Routledge
Organisations
  • Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences (FMG) - Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR)
Abstract This chapter explains how the rise of mechanical philosophy during the seventeenth century contributed to the transformation of the traditional, Aristotelian schema of four causes into the dominance of efficient causation as the paradigmatic cause by the time of David Hume. But the chapter simultaneously shows that the mechanical philosophy also gave rise to a number of problems internal to it, as diagnosed by Newton and Newtonian natural philosophers, that facilitated more careful analysis of the nature of causation.
Document type Chapter
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003528937-68
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