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What can be experienced is one event following another. The reductionist approach to causation can be exemplified with the case of two billiard balls: one ball is moving, hits another one and stops, and the second ball is moving. In A Treatise of Human Nature Hume coined two definitions of the cause in a following way:
Hume's account of causality has been influential. His first question is how to categorize causal relations. On his view, they belong either to relations of ideas or matters of fact. This distinction is referred to as Hume's fork. [4] Relations of ideas involve necessary connections that are knowable a priori independently of experience.
Hume interpreted the latter as an ontological view, i.e., as a description of the nature of causality but, given the limitations of the human mind, advised using the former (stating, roughly, that X causes Y if and only if the two events are spatiotemporally conjoined, and X precedes Y) as an epistemic definition of causality. We need an ...
The philosopher David Hume used the phrase frequently in his discussion of the limits of empiricism to explain our ideas of causation and inference.In An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume proposed that the origin of our knowledge of necessary connections arises out of observation of the constant conjunction of certain impressions across many instances ...
Other philosophers take a more generous view of Hume's position. Jenkins says: It is not so much that it is hardly worth altering a general thesis for one exception, which is very much the line Hume himself adopts. It is rather that the character of the phenomenon itself does not clearly run counter to the essential emphasis of Hume's doctrine.
Since then his view on the concept of causality is often predominating (see Causality, After the Middle Ages). Kant answered to Hume in many aspects, defending the a priority of universal causation. [13] In 2017 book Robert C. Koons & Timothy Pickavance point out four objections to Universal Causation: [14] If we additionally assume ...
Philosophical efforts to understand causality extend back at least to Aristotle's discussions of the four causes.It was long considered that an effect preceding its cause is an inherent self-contradiction because, as 18th century philosopher David Hume discussed, when examining two related events, the cause is by definition the one that precedes the effect.
Hume's strong empiricism, as in Hume's fork as well as Hume's problem of induction, was taken as a threat to Newton's theory of motion. Immanuel Kant responded with his Transcendental Idealism in his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant attributed to the mind a causal role in sensory experience by the mind's aligning the environmental input by arranging those sense data into the experience ...