Causation and Counterfactuals

One philosophical approach to causation sees counterfactual dependence as the key to the explanation of causal facts: for example, events c (the cause) and e (the effect) both occur, but had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. The counterfactual analysis of causation became a focus of philosophical debate after the 1973 publication of the late David Lewis's groundbreaking paper, "e;Causation,"e; which argues against the previously accepted "e;regularity"e; analysis and in favor of what he called the "e;promising alternative"e; of the counterfactual analysis. Thirty years after Lewis's paper, this book brings together some of the most important recent work connecting-or, in some cases, disputing the connection between-counterfactuals and causation, including the complete version of Lewis's Whitehead lectures, "e;Causation as Influence,"e; a major reworking of his original paper. Also included is a more recent essay by Lewis, "e;Void and Object,"e; on causation by omission. Several of the essays first appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Philosophy, but most, including the unabridged version of "e;Causation as Influence,"e; are published for the first time or in updated forms. Other topics considered include the "e;trumping"e; of one event over another in determining causation; de facto dependence; challenges to the transitivity of causation; the possibility that entities other than events are the fundamental causal relata; the distinction between dependence and production in accounts of causation; the distinction between causation and causal explanation; the context-dependence of causation; probabilistic analyses of causation; and a singularist theory of causation.