Article ID: CBB000831433

Notions of Cause: Russell's Thesis Revisited (2007)

unapi

We discuss Russell's 1913 essay arguing for the irrelevance of the idea of causation to science and its elimination from metaphysics as a precursor to contemporary philosophical naturalism. We show how Russell's application raises issues now receiving much attention in debates about the adequacy of such naturalism, in particular, problems related to the relationship between folk and scientific conceptual influences on metaphysics, and to the unification of a scientifically inspired worldview. In showing how to recover an approximation to Russell's conclusion while explaining scientists' continuing appeal to causal ideas (without violating naturalism by philosophically correcting scientists) we illustrate a general naturalist strategy for handling problems around the unification of sciences that assume different levels of naivete with respect to folk conceptual frameworks. We do this despite rejecting one of the premises of Russell's argument, a version of reductionism that was scientifically plausible in 1913 but is not so now. 1 Russell's Naturalistic Rejection of Causation 2 Psychology, Folk Notions and Intuitions 3 Causes in Science 4 Letting Science Hold Trumps

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Description Discusses “Russell's 1913 essay arguing for the irrelevance of the idea of causation to science and its elimination from metaphysics as a precursor to contemporary philosophical naturalism.” (from the abstract)


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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000831433/

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Authors & Contributors
Basile, Pierfrancesco
Iwata, Naoya
Ziche, Paul
Wilson, Catherine
Vossoughian, Nader
Travaglia, Pinella
Concepts
Philosophy
Metaphysics
Causality
Philosophy of science
Teleology
History of philosophy of science
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
17th century
Renaissance
Ancient
20th century
Places
Greece
Europe
Institutions
Vienna Circle
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