We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Philosophical theses are sometimes assailed from so many sides that, even if they have not been refuted, it becomes difficult for them to gain a fair hearing. A case in point seems to be the thesis that the sentence ‘Every event has a cause' (commonly known as the Causal Principle) may on occasion be used to assert something which, as a matter of contingent fact, is either true or false. In the interests of logical chivalry, I want to take up its defence.
My aim, it should be noted, is not to defend the truth of the Causal Principle, to claim that our world is one in which every event is causally determined by another event or set of events. So I shall have nothing to say about the arguments of those who—like the quantum physicists, Heisenberg, Bohr, and Born—claim to have shown that the Causal Principle is false; claim, that is, that our world is fundamentally indeterministic. My concern is only to establish the right of determinists and indeterminists alike to take seriously the question whether our world is in fact one in which every event has a cause.
1 Vendler, in Butler, R. J. (ed.), Analytical Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 13.Google Scholar
2 Analysis, Vol. X (1950).
3 “Every Event has a Cause,” Logic and Language, Series 2, ed. Flew, A. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953).Google Scholar
4 Hospers, J. An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (1st ed.; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956).Google Scholar
5 Pap, A. Elements of Analytic Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1949).Google Scholar
6 Ayer, A. J. The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1940).Google Scholar
7 Blanshard, B. The Nature of Thought, Vols. I and II (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939).Google Scholar
8 Ducasse, C. J. “Determinism, Freedom, and Responsibility,” in Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science, ed. Hook, S. (New York: New York University Press, 1958)Google Scholar.
9 “On the Notion of Cause,” in Mysticism and Logic (New York: Doubleday, 1957).
10 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, Kemp (London: Macmillan, 1950).Google Scholar
11 Analytical Philosophy, ed. Butler, R. J. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 13.Google Scholar
12 Analytical Philosophy, ed. Butler, R. J. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).Google Scholar
