Concept
Causality
Overview
how one process influences another
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
But we say: everywhere where there is causality, there is will; and no will acts without causality. The _punctum controversiæ_ therefore, is, whether will and causality can and must subsist together in one and the same process at the same time. What makes the knowledge, that this is indeed the case, so difficult, is the circumstance, that we know causality and will in two fundamentally different ways: causality…
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature
Names Causality several times; states what Causality is.
But philosophy does not merely use categories, it explains them. And Leibniz contends that to explain the category of causality in a mechanical sense, to understand by it physical influence actually transferred from one thing to another, is to make the idea inexplicable and irrational. The true meaning of causality is ideal. It signifies the relative positions which the objects concerned have in the harmonious…
John Dewey, Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding
Names Causality several times; states what Causality is.
For the present, I am merely concerned to discover what the law of causality is supposed to be. I pass, therefore, to the other definitions quoted above. The second definition need not detain us long, for two reasons. First, because it is psychological: not the "thought or perception" of a process, but the process itself, must be what concerns us in considering causality. Secondly, because it is circular: in…
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
Names Causality several times; states what Causality is.
Philosophers who discussed Causality
- Avicenna
- George Berkeley
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Mulla Sadra
- Immanuel Kant
- Victor Cousin
- Leucippus
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Marshall McLuhan
- Wesley C. Salmon
- J. L. Mackie
- Donald Davidson (philosopher)
- Wilhelm Wundt
- Lewis White Beck
- David Lewis (philosopher)
- Tyler Burge
- Paul Tillich
- Bertrand Russell
- Carl Jung
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Peter Hacker
- Brand Blanshard
- Beyond Good and Evil
- Language of thought hypothesis
Related ideas
- Aristotelian physics
- Arthur Danto
- French Revolution
- Francis Bacon
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Innatism
- Pyrrhonism
- Hinduism
- Herbert A. Simon
- Indian religions
- Immanuel Kant
- Intuition
- Future
- Jurisprudence
- Process and Reality
- Informal fallacy
- Karl Popper
- Karma
- Sextus Empiricus
- Middle Ages
- Metaphysics
- Law
- Anthropocentrism
- Aether (classical element)
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Action theory (philosophy).