Metapsychology Online Book Reviews: “Causation, it seems, is absolutely central. We will need to understand causation itself if we are to understand either causal theories in philosophy or the nature of the surrounding world.

Working through the papers in Causation and Counterfactuals will help us with this. The volume consists in eighteen cutting edge papers (twelve new, six previously published) by the best people in the field, as well as an editors’ introduction. Most are devoted to one leading view of causation — the counterfactual view. Hume articulated the basic idea this way: ‘we may define a cause to be an object followed by another . . where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.’ (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section VII)”