Dear all, This Thursday at the Serious Metaphysics Group, Toby Friend (from UCL) will be giving a talk titled 'Can parts cause their wholes?' (abstract below). We will meet in the philosophy faculty board room from 1:00-2:30.
Hope to see you there, Georgie Are there any causes which are also parts of their effects? Two popular Humean principles entail that there are not: first, causes must precede their effects whereas parts cannot precede their wholes; second, causes must be ontologically independent of their effects whereas parts are not similarly independent of their wholes. As long as we stick to pre-theoretical discussion of part-whole relationships between events, I will argue that neither principle is well supported. I first draw on a case-study: the collapse on August 2007 of Minnesota’s Bridge 9340 which carried the Interstate-35W over the Mississippi. From a position of neutrality with regard to theories of causation and parthood, I suggest that the post-analysis of the collapse revealed good reasons to conclude that the failure of the gusset plates at node U10 of the bridge was both a part and a cause of the collapse. This conclusion conflicts with both Humean principles. I then argue that neither principle is well-motivated on the basis of the coherence of the concepts involved or by more complex arguments put forward for them; in fact, there are reasons to reject them, further to the conclusion of the case-study itself. I end with some lessons for future theorising about causation and for the Humean tradition in philosophy of causation. -- Georgie Statham PhD Candidate Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
