CAUSALITY, TIME, AND THE UNITY OF NATURE: A CRITICAL STUDY IN SPECULATIVE METAPHYSICS

This essay is a study of causality. It opens by defending, against Hume, the common sense belief in an objective, extra-mental necessary connection between causes and effects.;The essay next considers whether the necessary connection between actual occasions may arise simply from the fact that each physical feeling is an act of experience--something which by nature "links" an experiencing subject occasion with an experienced datum occasion. It finds difficulties in this account as well.;The essay finally examines a new metaphysics of causation. If the association of events is not necessary but arbitrary, it asks, why are whole classes of similar events conjoined in the same "arbitrary" way?;The theory responds that there may be a partial, underlying identity among apparently separate events. Diverse events may be conjoined in the same way because, in a limited sense, the events themselves are one and the same.;The essay next considers Whitehead's explanation of causal necessity by reference to actual occasions and their physical prehensions. Whitehead proposes that the subjective form of a simple physical feeling must reiterate the subjective form of the antecedent feeling which is its datum. Unfortunately, he does not adequately explain why this re-enactment of subjective forms occurs or is "necessary." To this extent his theory is incomplete.;The theory distinguishes the "determinate events" of familiar experience from "generic substrata" which underlie these events and may be shared identically among them. These substrata have a status intermediate between the concreteness of particular events and the abstractness of universal properties.;The essay concludes that, when examined in detail, the theory of generic events fails to account fully for causal connectedness. These failings in no way disprove the existence of an objective causal necessity in nature, but we must look further for a full understanding of it.