Causality and Time: An Introductory Typology (Preprint)

2024

The four main concepts of causality are: causation (deterministic causality) and natural spontaneity (non-volitional indeterminism), and volition (free will by human or other souls) and influence (things intuited, perceived or conceived, making will easier or harder, without however annulling its freedom). We use the term ‘causality’ to signify a genus for these four species of cause-effect relations.

2002

We start from the well-known form of the interval of the special relativity, stare it, and build up an attempt to implement the causality from it. Some features appear to be new, they involve the mass of the particle and the structure of space-time. erev Tishrei, 10th.

Causality Ancient and Modern , 2020

Outlines the pre-enlightenment concept of causality stressing its cosmological connections.

2016

Since the moment Boethius meditated on the nature of time in his fifth book on The Consolation of Philosophy, we have more tools to reflect on the subject. The onset of relativity and quantum physics provides us with the best insight, to date, that guides our reflections on the philosophical debates that attempt to theorize a definition of time. To clearly address the problems related to the theoretical models that account for the nature of time, adjustments to our interpretation of the contextual issues involved in special relativity are in order if we are going to preserve our notion of causal reality. As the construction of string theory emerges as the reigning theory for quantum gravity, a precise picture of causal reality can be accounted for through theories such as Dyson’s Chronological Protection Agency, Hořava’s theory of gravity, and new insight to how simultaneity is interpreted in relativity theory. With this model, the question about time in the philosophical debates ca...

Jigyasa, 2019

In this paper, I have called on Prof. R. R. Pandey's exposition of the Advaitic Theory of Causation to probe into the idea of causation with respect to the notion of time. Here, I see that Prof. Pandey has not only elegantly explicated the Advaitic stand regarding the concept of causality but also have left to us the clue to understanding why Advaitins criticise and reject the veracity of the causal relation. What I have done in this is paper is but a development of an untapped idea of his own, though the mould given to it is my humble addition. For that purpose, I have followed Prof. Pandey's line of exposition. With that, I have supplied my arguments and have inquired into his exposition, and for that matter also the Advaitic theory, of causation. My arguments pertain mainly to the time considerations of the various concepts and theories of causality. Firstly, attention will turn from the common sense notion of causality to the philosophical sense of causality. Then, criticism of the concept of causality is adduced, following the Advaitic line of criticism as reconstructed by Prof. Pandey on the basis of Māṇḍukya-kārikā of Gauḍapāda. This follows a review taking time into consideration and then it tries to lay bare the ramifications and their underlying assumptions regarding time. Further, the same pattern is followed to probe into the theories of causation formulated by different Indian Philosophical Schools. Meanwhile, I will also try to check whether any of these theories are concerned with time or not. Showing that the criticism projected against the concept of causality and its theories are based on a prone to fail sort of reasoning and in this way, to critically examine the criticisms executed by Advaitins is the purpose of this paper. Prof. R. R. Pandey writes in The Advaitic Theory of Causation, "The common-sense notion of causality is based on our concept of time so that cause for all practical purposes must be an antecedent to

Synthese

This paper offers a new way to evaluate counterfactual conditionals on the supposition that actually, there is no time. We then parlay this method of evaluation into a way of evaluating causal claims. Our primary aim is to preserve, at a minimum, the assertibility of certain counterfactual and causal claims once time has been excised from reality. This is an important first step in a more general reconstruction project that has two important components. First, recovering our ordinary language claims involving notions such as persistence, change and agency and, second, recovering enough observational evidence so that any timeless metaphysics is not empirically self-refuting. However, the project of investigating causation in a timeless setting has a greater relevance than its application to timeless physical theory alone. For, as we show, it can be used to model the assertibility conditions of causal claims more generally.

2013

The understanding of causal chains and mechanisms is an essential part of any scientific activity that aims at better explanation of its subject matter, and better understanding of it. While any account of causality requires that a cause should precede its effect, accounts of causality in physics are complicated by the fact that the role of time in current theoretical physics has evolved very substantially throughout the twentieth century. In this article, I review the status of time and causality in physics, both the classical physics of the nineteenth century, and modern physics based on relativity and quantum mechanics. I then move on to econometrics, with some mention of statistics more generally, and emphasise the role of models in making sense of causal notions, and their place in scientific explanation.

Philosophical Books, 1982

2021

The world is composed by events. We can sense the changes of events directly by our five senses or indirectly by using the measurement equipment and tools. If in a closed system including the observer no changes are sensed, no time passes and if even a very small change is sensed, time passes. It means that the time is not a real degree of freedom and can be only understood through the concept of changes in events. The events can be considered as relata and their mutual or multiple interactions can be considered as relation. Causality can be sensed if one relata creates a change in the other relata and in consequence the passage of time can be sensed. These two relates are connected to each other by a causal world line. If two relates are connected by a timelike curve theoretically, but they cannot make change in each other, one relata has only a priority in occurrence respect to other (time precedence), and in consequence, one can omit the past non-casual events from the casual wor...

Presentism is the view that only present temporal entities (tenselessly) exist. A widely-discussed problem for presentism concerns causation and, more specifically , the supposed cross-temporally relational character of it. I think that the best reply to this problem can already be found in the literature on temporal ontology: it consists, roughly, in showing that (at least) some of the main approaches to causation can be rephrased so as to avoid commitment to any cross-temporal relation , including the causal relation itself. The main purpose of this paper is to extend this reply to the process view, an approach to causation that has not been considered within this debate until now. I shall do this by taking into account Dowe's conserved quantity theory-a recent and prominent theory of this sort-and employing it as a proxy for the other major process theories of causation. In dealing with Dowe's process theory of causation, however, two additional problems must be faced: one concerns the four-dimensional spacetime framework on which its formulation relies; the other concerns the very notion of causal process (and the companion notion of causal interaction). While the presentistic account of Dowe's theory (and, virtually, of the process view of causation in general) put forth in this paper is intended primarily as a contribution to the mentioned paraphrase based enterprise of reconciliation between presentism and causation, I shall also offer some reasons for presentists to prefer the process view of causation to the other views of causation that have already been reconciled with presentism.