| The Effectiveness of Causes |
| Causation is one of the perpetual problems of philosophy. In her latest book Dorothy Emmet starts from the obvious point that causes need effects, and says that some prevalent views fail to account for the effectiveness of causes. These views take causes and effects to be events which are instances of laws. This may do for one kind of causal explanation, but not for a metaphysics of the world in which causal relations are supposed to hold. It only gives a world of events, each of which is presented as an unchanging unit. She calls such a world a 'Zeno universe', since in it transitions (and in the end movement) get lost. Since she thinks the world is not like this, she locates causation not in events but in their 'participants'. Thus construed, so-called event causation is just one kind of 'transeunt' causation, where effects succeed their causes in time. But there is also 'immanent' causation, where the effects are not temporally separable from their causes. Dorothy Emmet sees immanent causation in the mere fact that anything persists, in certain organic and mental processes, and perhaps in the operation of what is called 'efficacious grace'. Thus the notion of Cause is not a single nor a simple one. In general it stands for there being something on which something else depends; but causal dependence can take various forms, some of which call for a strong view which has implications for other metaphysical questions. |
| Dorothy Emmet is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy of the University of Manchester. She read Greats at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, worked for two winters as a tutor at the Maesyrhaf Educational Settlement in the Rhondda Valley, and held Commonwealth Fellowship at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass., where she studied with A. N. Whitehead. From 1932 to 1938 she was Lecturer in Philosophy at King's College, Newcastle upon Tyne, and went from there to the University of Manchester, first as Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion and then as Sir Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy. She is now retired and living in Cambridge. |
| She is the author of Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking, Function, Purpose and Powers, Rules, Roles and Relations, and The Moral Prism, and co-editor (with Alistair MacIntyre) of Sociological Theory and Philosophical Analysis. |
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