Seminar in English.
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, it is 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.
Particularly lively questions to be addressed in the course of these two days include the following: when we assert that C is the cause of an effect E, on what basis, or according to what criteria, do we distinguish C from one or other of the conditions involved in the occurrence of E? Can it be argued that a cause is sufficient to produce its effect, while a condition of E is merely necessary for its occurrence? Can there be a causal connection between C and E without C necessitating E? Assuming that the occurrence of E is indeterminate, in the sense that it is devoid of sufficient conditions, would it then be causeless? Would we need to adopt a probabilistic conception of causality to account for the occurrence of E? Is such a conception - according to which a cause increases the probability of its effect - defensible? Is the fact that X increases the probability of Y's occurrence necessary and/or sufficient for X to be the cause of Y? Doesn't the problem of "preemption" preclude this? What, moreover, is the metaphysical nature of the connection between a cause C and its effect E? Is it a statistical correlation, a physical process, a counterfactual dependency relation, a nomological subsumption? What, then, is the metaphysical nature of causal relata : are we dealing with facts, events, objects, properties? Still other questions: can absences, omissions and non-occurrences be understood as true causes? In relation, this time, to what is at stake in the causalexplanation: does giving a causal explanation of E by C amount to maintaining that C is the cause of E? Or is it possible for E to be causally explained by C, without C being held to be a true cause of E? Does our concept of causation cover two fundamentally distinct ideas: that of a counterfactual dependency relationship between C and E (if C hadn't happened, then E wouldn't have happened either), and that of a physical or mechanistic production of E by C? In particular, does such a distinction matter for answering the question of whether causality is transitive? Furthermore, is a causal connection necessarily the connection of two temporally distinct relata, or can C and E be simultaneous? Must there be a temporal priority of C over E for C to be a cause of E?
Whether or not the idea of causality is, as Russell once wrote, "the relic of a bygone age, which survives, like the British monarchy, only because it is wrongly assumed that it does no harm to anyone", the Focus on would like to make it clear that one must first be able to decide the kind of questions just raised before such a verdict can be reached, and that the heart of philosophical work on causality lies in the precise treatment of these questions.
