Abstract
Mario Bunge wrote his classic Causality and Modern Science more than 60 years ago, and a third revised edition was published by Dover in 1979. With its impressive scope and historical perspective it was a long way ahead of its time. But many of its insights still have not been sufficiently appreciated by physicists and philosophers alike. These include Bunge’s distinction between causation and other types of determination, his critique of the still-dominant Humean accounts of causality as leaving out the productive aspect of determination, his critique of the conflation of determination with predictability, his insistence on the fictional character of isolated causal chains, and his demonstration that “causal connectability” depends only on the principle of retarded action, not causation. It will be argued that there is a (perhaps surprising) degree of agreement between his views on determinism and causality and those of Leibniz, and a comparison between the two thinkers’ views is used to throw further light on these matters.
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- 1.
One could say the same about Carl Hoefer’s article on causal determinism in the same encyclopedia (Hoefer 2016).
- 2.
The Preface to the First Edition is signed “M. B., Buenos Aires, December 1956”.
- 3.
See Bunge 1979, pp. 238, 59 and 229.
- 4.
See Bunge 1979, p. 214.
- 5.
See Bunge 1979, pp. 138, 178, 195 and 76, respectively.
- 6.
Leibniz, from an unpublished manuscript 1677 (A VI 4, 1370). All quotations from Leibniz are given in my translation from the Akademie edition or the Gerhardt ones, although I have also referenced the corresponding page numbers to available English translations such as Loemker’s (Leibniz 1976) where possible.
- 7.
In his New Essays Leibniz writes “however many instances confirm a general truth, they do not suffice to establish its universal necessity” (A VI 6, 49/Leibniz 1981, p. 49) and “when a new situation appears similar to its predecessor, it is expected to have the same concomitant features as before, as though things were linked in reality just because their images are linked in the memory” (A VI 6, 51/Leibniz 1981, p. 51).
- 8.
See e.g. Hoyle (1952) and Hoyle et al. (1995). “The basic theory underlying the quasi-steady state cosmological model”. Proceedings of the Royal Society A. 448: 191.
- 9.
Leibniz, Theodicy §384; GP VI 343/Leibniz 1985, p. 355.
- 10.
These claims are made, with Leibniz’s own emphasis, at the beginning of consecutive paragraphs in an unpublished manuscript, Principia logico-metaphysica (A VI 4, 1646–7/Leibniz 1976, p. 269), probably drawn up in 1689 for his Italian colleagues.
- 11.
Leibniz explicitly acknowledges this debt to Hobbes in his Theodicy (GP VI 389/Leibniz 1985, pp. 394–95).
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
See Winnie (1977) for details.
- 15.
See in particular Goldenbaum (2016) for a defence of Leibniz’s claim to originating the principle.
- 16.
- 17.
“There is reason to think that there are infinitely many souls, or more generally of primitive entelechies, possessing something analogous to perception and appetite, and that all of them are and forever remain substantial forms of bodies” (New Essays; A VI 6, 318/Leibniz 1981, p. 318).
- 18.
See the excerpts given by Palmer in his critical edition of Voltaire (2009).
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Arthur, R.T.W. (2019). Mario Bunge on Causality: Some Key Insights and Their Leibnizian Precedents. In: Matthews, M.R. (eds) Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16673-1_11
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