ABSTRACT
Arguably, the first idea philosophers have to get rid of in order to liberate their philosophical imaginations is the idea that causation is event-causation. In their struggle against dualism, physicalists (mainly Jaegwon Kim) have not forgotten to maintain what is in effect physicalistic causal monism: the view that there is only one relation of causation, one exclusively between (purely) physical events. However, from the point of view of a liberal, open-minded metaphysics—a point of view neither science nor philosophy forces us to renounce—it is implausible that causal power resides in physical events, for the simple reason that it does not seem to reside in events at all. Events do not have causal power, and therefore there is no event-causation: no causation by events. Scrutinize an event as much as you like, you will not discover any causal power in it (whether you consider the event in itself, or in the context of other events—which are just more of the same and form, in fact, just another event, which is just larger, but with nothing new in it regarding causation). Considered objectively, one event just happens after another, or simultaneously with it. There is, it is true, an objective regularity in the progress of events, even a strict regularity; but it cannot be the foundation of event-causation; at best it is itself the outcome of causation—not, however, of a causation by events. Does the so-called counterfactual analysis rescue event-causation? We do indeed assert many counterfactual conditionals about events: “If E had happened, E´ would have happened”, “If E had not happened, E´ would not have happened”; but it is clear that the truth of such conditionals and the necessity implied in them are neither based on a causal power of events nor gives causal power to events (whatever is your favourite analysis of counterfactual conditionals). Since there is no event-causation without events having causal power, it follows that whatever it is that is analyzed by the so-called counterfactual analysis of causation, it is not event-causation. The truth is: there is no such thing as event-causation, since there is no such thing as the causal power of events. 1
