ABSTRACT
The author does not believe that how events are talked about and causation reveals anything metaphysically deep about the causal relation or causal relata themselves. The author examines the many proposals in the metaphysics literature before turning to an explication and defense of a specific metaphysics of events and forces. Lawrence Lombard has said that changes are movements of physical objects "at an interval of time in a quality space" and that causal relata just are such changes. According to David K. Lewis, causal relata are events, and events are properties of regions of space-time. A number of philosophers have argued that events are property exemplifications at times. Some have argued that some concrete particulars that are agents and/or substances (by themselves) in which properties inhere stand in causal relations. There are four fundamental types of interactions between fundamental entities in the authors’ best physical theories, viz., the strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational interactions.
