The subject of this article is the ontological theory of causality presented in Roman Ingarden's 'Controversy over the Existence of the World'. The peculiarity of this theory is discussed, and some differences between it and Hume's and Kant's theories are shown. The article presents Ingarden's definition of cause, the principles of causality, and rarely discussed problems connected with the analysis and division of events. The changes in the method of inquiry which occur in the third part of the 'Controversy over the Existence of the World' and which are related to the problem of causality are also examined.
The paper discusses the regularity account of causation but finds it insufficient as a complete account of our notion of causality. The attractiveness of the regularity account is its attempt to understand causation in terms of empirically accessible features of the world. However, this account does not match our intuition that singular causality is prior in normal epistemic situations and that there is more to causation than mere succession. Apart from succession and regularity, the concept of causality also contains a modal feature which allows us to engage in counterfactual discourses about singular causal events and to claim that a particular cause is both sufficient and necessary for its effect in the circumstances. However, we may directly observe singular causes, but the modal element is not something we can possibly observe. Rather, this element is something we add to our perception of succession. Thus, the paper suggests that the modal feature of causality is a mental construction which was originally formed by our knowledge of certain structural features of similar events in other situations. It stems not from what we actually observe but from what we have observed or may observe under different but relevant circumstances. So the concept of causation has partly an empirical content and partly a constructed one.
The paper presents the hypothesis of the mathematical rationality of the world put forward by Polish Platonist Michael Heller. There are to obstacles which make it difficult to understand this hypothesis. These are: (1) a conviction that mathematical entities are causally powerless and (2) a suspicion that mathematical objects, understood as ontological beings, are unintelligible.
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The paper deals with the relation between argumentation and causality. After having defined causality (referring to D. Hume) and its language representation, we distinguish three types of argumentative discourse articulated by an argument-introducing connective (parce que, puisque, car, en effet etc.), i.e. argument for the utterance content, argument for the illocutionary act and argument for the act of enunciation. Afterwards, we examine the relation between argument and conclusion in these three types of discourse from the point of view of causality. We show that causality operates as a principle which the argumentation is based on only in the case of truth-conditional acts. We try to explain some restrictions concerning the distribution of the causally related entities which are observed.
The present analysis of the evolution of the concept of freedom in Ernst Tugendhat’s philosophy aims to highlight several interesting facts. First, Tugendhat attempts to describe the meaning of Kant’s statement “I could have acted otherwise” from a non-transcendental perspective. Second, he makes an effort to avoid the classical Kantian dilemma of the relation of free will and determinism by posing the question differently. Third, he situates the issue of the relation of freedom and causality in the framework of the inner structure of freedom – examining it from the perspective of the human’s relation to him- or herself. Fourth, he attempts repeatedly to overcome the impossibility of considering freedom in the objective language of causality. The paper demonstrates why the issue of freedom remains a central problem of continental philosophy.
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