ABSTRACT
This chapter presents influential accounts of causation from the history of philosophy. It introduces regularity, counterfactual, probabilistic, primitivist, and physical theories of causation. The chapter evaluates arguments for and against these theories. It then distinguishes and evaluates the targets and goals of a metaphysical account of causation. Causation is what the philosopher David Hume called ‘the cement of the universe.’ It is what ties together the various disparate things that happen. Contemporary discussions of causation typically concern something more like Aristotle's efficient causation. The chapter considers a puzzle about the nature of causation from a later period in the history of philosophy that continues to inform discussions of the topic today. This puzzle concerns how people could ever learn about causal relations. This philosophical problem was raised by David Hume. Reductive theories of causation are theories that provide accounts of what it is for one event to cause another, where these accounts are formulated entirely in noncausal terms.
