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c h ap t e r 3 Causality and Time It takes only a modest sampling of current writing to verify what one of the lastest books on causality calls ‘‘the bewildering confusion prevailing in contemporary philosophic and scientific literature.’’1 In this essay I would like to discuss a facet of the analysis of causality which seems to me in need of special clarification. This is the relation between causality and temporal sequence. Does the relation of cause to effect involve a temporal priority of cause as cause over its effect?2 That such is the case is widely assumed or explicitly argued by many contemporary philosophers, especially philosophers of science, and by no means only by empiricists. Let us look at a few characteristic examples. The first are from representatives of the empirical tradition (with apologies to Dewey for including him in a category that he transcends at many other points): By the nature of the case, causality, however it be defined, consists in the sequential order itself. . . . In fact, causality is another name for the sequential order itself.3 Causality, as a universal law, will then be the following: Given any event e1, there is an event e2, and a time interval t such that, whenever e1 occurs, e2 follows after an interval t. I am not concerned as yet to discover whether this law is true or false. . . . I am merely concerned to discover what the law of causality is supposed to be.4 Next, from two philosophers of science: When two spatially separated occurrences stand in the relation of cause and effect, then the cause is always earlier than the effect. This is an explicit denial First published in Experience, Existence, and the Good: Essays in Honor of Paul Weiss, ed. Irwin Lieb (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), 143–57. 䉷 1961 by Southern Illinois University Press. 27 28 Causality and Time of the claim that the causal relation can be sustained only by simultaneous events. Thus, the theory of relativity denies Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s claim that with the cessation of the cause, the effect ceases also.5 There are only two fundamental relations in the universe: that of successive causal connection and that of contemporary causal independence.6 Last, from two metaphysicians: Causality therefore means this, that the series of states in process do not flow out of each other at random, but in a determined order, so that in the sense of temporal succession one state is dependent on another, that is, one brings forth [hervorbringt] the other. The earlier state is ‘‘cause’’; the later is ‘‘effect.’’ One brings forth; the other is brought forth.7 A cause precedes its effect in time. When the cause is, the effect is not; when the effect is, the cause is not. . . . An actual cause cannot have an actual effect when that cause exists, without destroying the temporal gap between cause and effect; an actual effect cannot have an actual cause without destroying the temporal distance between it and its cause. But an actual cause has a possible effect, an effect that can but does not yet exist; an actual effect has a past cause, a cause that did but does not now exist.8 The acceptance of temporal sequence as a property of the causal relation is held almost universally by modern scientists, insofar as they attempt to work out the philosophy of their own methodology.9 The precise point I would like this essay to focus on is whether it is possible to hold an ontological realism of causal action, to hold a genuine causal efficacy or influx of being from one thing to another, and still maintain that cause and effect form a temporal sequence. My aim, therefore, is not to refute Hume or prove the existence of causal efficacy in the universe.10 It is merely to draw out the necessary implications of a realism of causal productivity. This will, I hope, help to clarify the choice between viable metaphysical possibilities , obscured at present, it seems to me, by much fuzzy thinking on this point. To throw my cards on the table without further ado, I would like to submit that, outside of a deliberate and quite legitimate restriction of the meaning of ‘‘causality’’ within the discourse of empirical science to mean ‘‘predictability according to law (either deterministic or statistical),’’ the philosopher must make an option between (1) objective causal efficacy with...

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