Concept
Agent causation
Overview
Agent causation (or agent causality) is a category of determination in metaphysics, where a being who is not an event—namely an agent—can cause events (particularly the agent's own actions). Agent causation contrasts with event causation, which occurs when an event causes another event. Whether agent causation as a concept is logically sound is itself a topic of philosophical debate.
Defenders of this theory include Thomas Reid and Roderick Chisholm. Reid believed that agents are the only beings who have a will, and considered having a will to be a necessary condition of being considered the cause of an event.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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_"Will to power" and causality._--From a psychological point of view the idea of "cause" is our feeling of power in the act which is called willing--our concept effect is the superstition that this feeling of power is itself the force which moves things.... A state which accompanies an event and is already an effect of that event is deemed "sufficient cause" of the latter; the tense relationship of our feeling of…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power
States what Agent causation is.
Those who have contended for a radical distinction between agent and patient, have generally conceived the agent as that which causes some state of, or some change in the state of, another object which is called the patient. But a little reflection will show that the licence we assume of speaking of phenomena as _states_ of the various objects which take part in them, (an artifice of which so much use has been made…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
States what Agent causation is.
On the other hand, the end, the agent, and the form are principles of action, but in a certain order. For the first principle of action is the end which moves the agent; the second is the agent; the third is the form of that which the agent applies to action (although the agent also acts through its own form); as may be clearly seen in things made by art. For the craftsman is moved to action by the end, which is the…
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
Close in meaning to Agent causation; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Agent causation
Related ideas
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Libertarianism (metaphysics).