ABSTRACT
Georg Henrik von Wright championed the manipulability approach to causal analysis in works published in the 1970s. Peter Menzies and Huw Price, in an essay published in 1993, promoted an "agency theory" of causation as an improved version of the manipulability view. Judea Pearl has created a mathematically sophisticated framework to uncover causal relations in complex cases. Pearl introduced the concept of a "do-operator" that represents an intervention. Donald Gillies noted that causal status may be attributed to both "productive actions" and "avoidable actions. Gillies was sensitive to the problem of unmanipulable causes such as earthquakes and asteroid–earth collisions. Causal relations have objective status in the world independently of human awareness. James Woodward's broad interpretation of "possible interventions" brings astronomical events within the scope of causal analysis and even allows for the possibility of instantaneous causal influence at a distance. Woodward presented a quite inclusive characterization of causal relatedness.
