What Russell Got Right
- Creators
- Hitchcock, Christopher
- Others:
- Price, Huw
- Corry, Richard
Abstract
[Introduction] Bertrand Russell's 'On the Notion of Cause' is now 90 years old, yet its central claim still provokes. To summarize his argument, I can do no better than to provide an excerpt from his oft-quoted introduction: the word 'cause' is so inextricably bound up with misleading associations as to make its complete extrusion from the philosophical vocabulary desirable ... All philosophers, of every school, imagine that causation is one of the fundamental axioms or postulates of science, yet, oddly enough, in advanced sciences such as gravitational astronomy, the word 'cause' never appears. Dr James Ward ... makes this a ground of complaint against physics ... To me, it seems that ... the reason why physics has ceased to look for causes is that, in fact, there are no such things. The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm. (Russell 1913, p. 1).
Additional Information
© 2007 Oxford University Press. For helpful comments I would like to thank audience members at the University of Queensland, the University of Helsinki, and the Causal Republicanism conference in Sydney, especially Peter Menzies, Huw Price, and David Spurrett. I would also like to thank Alan Hájek, Jonathan Schaffer, and Jim Woodward for comments on later drafts of the paperAdditional details
- Eprint ID
- 44722
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20140407-164315287
- Created
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2014-04-09Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2020-09-09Created from EPrint's last_modified field