Richard Taylor´s Metaphysics of Causation

Causation is the relation between cause and effect, or the act of bringing about an effect, which may be an event, a state, or an object. The concept of causation has long been recognized as one of the fundamental philosophical importance. Hume called it the “cement of the universe”: causation is the relation that connects events and objects of this world in significant relationships. Further, causation is intimately related to explanation: to ask for an explanation of an event is, to ask for its cause. But according to Richard Taylor, causation is not that simple and discoverable relationship between states, processes and events. “What we want, then, is a conceptual analysis of this basic concept [causation] we so securely possess.”

For Taylor, there are two things about our manner of expressing such causal relationships in common speech:

1. An object or substance seems often to be referred to as a cause.

2. Each of objects seems to be alleged to have done something, in the same sense in which men, for example, are often described as doing various things.

So what is the real cause in this example: “a cigarette started this fire”? Obviously there are some agents to impel it. There should be some people who smoked there, somebody then throw his half-smoked cigarette toward a haystack before driving away. A few minutes later, a wind could blow hard to make a fire. By using the theory of agency, Lawrence Davis proposed a notion of direct causation which is that every action involves direct causation of an event by an agent. Taylor, however, goes further by conceiving that some causal chains have beginnings and those chains start with agents themselves. Some other authors think that Taylor only concentrates on the agent is the...

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...me other which it could also produce? That is the answer of final cause for every agent acts for an end. We need efficient cause to intent the final cause but the final cause has a character of good for the agent.

To conclude, the medieval lovers of wisdom talked about causation, Taylor talks about its explanation. For the medieval philosophers' principle of causality, Taylor uses the principle of sufficient reason. Taylor is following a tradition begun in early modern philosophy and then develops his theory of action and purpose. Taylor's Principle of Sufficient Reason states that for every positive truth, there is a reason why it is so, rather than not. Besides, W.Norris Clarke uses two of the 4 causes of Aristotle as his explanation for what makes (who) and why beings have their character as unity (the one) but at the same time different as diversity (the many).