David Papineau

King’s College London

Causation

2 June 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Causation is a temporally asymmetric relation, and so not grounded in fundamental dynamics alone. But this does not mean it does not exist or is unimportant. In this talk I shall show how causal relations are grounded in probabilistic connections between macroscopic facts, and how this analysis helps with a number of philosophical problems, including mental causation, pre-emption, counterfactual conditionals, and decision theory.