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Can I read The Effectiveness of Causes on EtoBox?
The Effectiveness of Causes by Dorothy Emmet (auth.) is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.
What is The Effectiveness of Causes about?
Causation is one of the perpetual problems of philosophy. In her latest book Dorothy Emmet starts from the obvious point that causes need effects, and says that some prevalent views fail to account for the effectiveness of causes. These views take causes and effects to be events which are instances of laws. This may do for one kind of causal explanation, but not for a metaphysics of the world in which causal relations are supposed to hold. It only gives a world of events, each of which is presented as an unchanging unit. She calls such a world a 'Zeno universe', since in it transitions (and in the end movement) get lost. Since she thinks the world is not like this, she locates causation not in events but in their 'participants'. Thus construed, so-called event causation is just one kind of 'transeunt' causation, where effects succeed their causes in time. But there is also 'immanent' causation, where the effects are not temporally separable from their causes. Dorothy Emmet sees immanent causation in the mere fact that anything persists, in certain organic and mental processes, and perhaps in the operation of what is called 'efficacious grace'. Thus the notion of Cause is not a sing
Who reads The Effectiveness of Causes?
It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.
Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.
- Author
- Dorothy Emmet (auth.)
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan UK
- Published
- 1984
- Language
- EN
- ISBN
- 9781349071678
- Category
- nonfiction
- Subjects
- Science, Philosophy, Physics