ABSTRACT
Even though it might not seem significant to separate the question of “what is the cause of a given effect?” from that of “what is the effect of a given cause?”, I believe that this simple verbal distinction reflects the wide gulf between most philosophical discussions of causation and the practice of experimental science. Aristotle began it all by identifying various notions of the meaning of a thing’s cause: its material cause, its efficient cause, its formal cause, and its final cause. Hume’s three criteria—constant conjunction, temporal succession, and spatial contiguity—all refer to what he believed we must observe before we conclude that A is the cause of B. Other examples are easily cited. The “principle of causality” asserts that every phenomenon has a cause.
