The secret connexion : causation, realism, and David Hume
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Bibliographic Information
The secret connexion : causation, realism, and David Hume
Clarendon Press , Oxford University Press, 1989
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Secret connection
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Note
Bibliography: p. [285]-288
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
It is widely supposed that David Hume (1711-1776) invented the regularity theory of causation, holding that causal relations are nothing but a matter of one type of thing being regularly followed by another. It is also widely supposed that he was quite right about this, and that it was one of his greatest contributions to philosophy. Galen Strawson argues in this book that the regularity theory of causation is indefensible, and that Hume never adopted it in any case. He explains that Hume did not claim that causation in the natural world is just a matter of regular succession, as such a dogmatic metaphysical claim about the nature of reality would have been utterly contrary to his fundamental philosophical principles. The author concludes that Hume claimed only that the regularity of succession was all that we could ever know of causation.
Table of Contents
- Part 1 Meaning, scepticism and reality: the "Humean" view of causation
- a summary of the argument
- "objects" - preliminaries
- the untenability of the realist regularity theory of causation
- "objects" - complications
- the notion of the ultimate nature of reality
- Hume's strict scepticism
- Hume's theory of ideas as applied to the idea of causation
- the "AP" property
- the problem of meaning
- external objects and causation. Part 2 Causation in the "Treatise". Part 3 Causation in the "Enquiry": the question of irony
- causation and inductive scepticism
- the undiscovered and the undiscoverable
- causation and human beings
- the Occasionalists
- the two definitions of cause. Part 4 Reason, reality and regularity: the meaning of "cause".
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