In the last forty years, the philosophy of causality has undergone considerable development, although it is not certain that this has always been fully appreciated in France. Indeed, we find it hard to shake off the idea that the philosophy of causality essentially consists of : recalling the Humean critique of the idea of causal connection; deeming this critique definitive (but relatively superficial); re-examining Kant's criticalist position, in which the movement inaugurated by Hume would be both fully developed and rendered philosophically profound ; to argue that twentieth-century science has established the intrinsically indeterminate nature of the ultimate nature of reality; and finally, to assert that there is a relationship between this supposed lesson of twentieth-century science and a position like Kant's (which we can't really imagine challenging), such that the latter is validated (rather than challenged) by the former.
The rise of the philosophy of causality since the early 1970s has largely been part of the great revival of metaphysics since that period, which has gone hand in hand with the rise of the metaphysics of laws of nature, modality, probability or properties. One of the remarkable features of the current philosophical period, which this colloquium would like to bring to light, is that the most promising recent developments in these different fields - and in the philosophy of causality in particular - have as their principle their close interweaving, succeeding the sometimes hyperspecialized aspect of the research of the previous period.