Causality and the Relation of States in Physics
Author: Gennadiĭ Aleksandrovich Svechnikov
Publisher:
Published: 1971
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPosts
Causal Reasoning in Physics
Author: Mathias Frisch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-10-09
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 1107031494
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book argues, partly through detailed case studies, for the importance of causal reasoning in physics.
Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality
Author: Huw Price
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 415
ISBN-13: 0199278199
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe difference between cause and effect seems obvious and crucial in ordinary life, yet missing modern physics. Almost a century ago, Bertrand Russell called the law of causality 'a relic of a bygone age'. Scholars revisit Russell's conclusion, discussing one of the most significant and puzzling issues in contemporary thought.
Complementarity, Causality and Explanation
Author: John Losee
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-28
Total Pages: 141
ISBN-13: 1351527118
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPhilosophers have discussed the relationship of cause and effect from ancient times through our own. Prior to the work of Niels Bohr, these discussions presupposed that successful causal attribution implies explanation. The success of quantum theory challenged this presupposition. Bohr introduced a principle of complementarity that provides a new way of looking at causality and explanation.In this succinct review of the history of these discussions, John Losee presents the philosophical background of debates over the cause-effect relation. He reviews the positions of Aristotle, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill. He shows how nineteenth-century theories in physics and chemistry were informed by a dominant theory of causality and how specific developments in physics provided the background for the emergence of quantum theory.Problems created for the causality implies explanation thesis by the emergence of quantum theory are reviewed in detail. Losee evaluates Bohr's proposals to apply a principle of complementarity within physics, biology, and psychology. He also discusses the feasibility of using complementarity as a principle of interpretation within Christian theology. This volume, which includes an in-depth index, is an essential addition to the libraries of advanced undergraduate and graduate students, philosophers, and those interested in causality and explanation.
Thinking about Causes
Author: Peter Machamer
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
Published: 2010-06-15
Total Pages: 327
ISBN-13: 0822971119
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEmerging as a hot topic in the mid-twentieth century, causality is one of the most frequently discussed issues in contemporary philosophy. Causality has been a central concept in philosophy as well as in the sciences, especially the natural sciences, dating back to its beginning in Greek thought. David Hume famously claimed that causality is the cement of the universe. In general terms, it links eventualities, predicts the consequences of action, and is the cognitive basis for the acquisition and the use of categories and concepts in the child. Indeed, how could one answer why-questions, around which early rational thought begins to revolve, without hitting on the relationships between reason and consequence, cause and effect, or without drawing these distinctions? But a comprehensive definition of causality has been notoriously hard to provide, and virtually every aspect of causation has been subject to much debate and analysis.Thinking About Causes brings together top philosophers from the United States and Europe to focus on causality as a major force in philosophical and scientific thought. Topics addressed include: ancient Stoicism and moral philosophy; the case of sacramental causality; traditional causal concepts in Descartes; Kant on transcendental laws; the influence of J. S. Mill's politics on his concept of causation; plurality in causality; causality in modern physics; causality in economics; and the concept of free will.Taken together, the essays in this collection from the Pittsburgh -Konstanz series provide the best current thinking about causality, especially as it relates to the philosophy of science.
Causality and Reversibility in Irreversible Time
Author: Sergey M. Korotaev
Publisher: Scientific Research Publishing, Inc. USA
Published: 2011-10-06
Total Pages: 130
ISBN-13: 1618960539
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the book the idea of irreversibility as an inherent property of time is developed theoretically and experimentally. The matter is related with causality, and the method of causal analysis is presented. The quantum causal analysis helps understand the principle of week causality which admits extraction of information from the future without the classical paradoxes. It implies a possibility of observation of the future as the existing reality. So, the acceptance of time irreversibility leads to a striking manifestation of reversibility – signaling in reverse time. Quantum insight allows considering correlations of the distant irreversible processes as nonlocal ones originated from a macroscopic entanglement. The experimental approach to study of macroscopic nonlocality is discussed, and design of the experimental setup is described. The results of experiments on macroscopic nonlocal correlations, the signals in reverse time and their application to the forecast of large-scale random processes are expounded.
Theories of Causality
Author: John Losee
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-28
Total Pages: 219
ISBN-13: 1351472291
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat types of entities qualify as causes and effects? What is the relationship between cause and effect? How are causal claims to be assessed? The first question deals with the structure of the world; the second is about theories that interpret the relationship of causes to effects; while the third has to do with proper procedure in science and everyday life. This volume is a wide-ranging history of answers that have been given to these three questions, and their relationship to scientific understanding.Losee presents a number of theories of causality within a historical survey that emphasizes the interrelationship between these theories and developments in science. His analysis displays the strengths and weaknesses of these theories so as to contribute to our present understanding of causal relatedness.Among the positions discussed are those of Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Mill, Salmon, Lewis, and Woodward. Losee's analysis displays the strengths and weaknesses of theories that identify causal relatedness with regularity of sequence, probability increase, energy transfer, exchange of a conserved quantity, counterfactual dependence, and inferability.These theories are judged, in part,by their ability to resolvedifficulties posed by instances of overdetermination,causation by omission, preventive causation, and causation by disconnection. Since applications of the theories to these instances disagree, a strategy of employing multiple concepts of causation is examined.Theories of Causality also describes the particular difficulties for causal analysis posed by quantum mechanics. One such difficulty is the prohibition against combining a causal analysis of a quantum process with a spatio-temporal description of that process.
Time, Causality, and the Quantum Theory
Author: S. Mehlberg
Publisher: Springer
Published: 1980-11-30
Total Pages: 332
ISBN-13: 9027707219
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn intermittent but mentally quite disabling illness prevented Henry Mehlberg from becoming recognized more widely as the formidable scholar he was, when at his best. During World War II, he had lived in hiding under the false identity of an egg farmer, when the Nazis occupied his native Poland. After relatively short academic appointments at the University of Toronto and at Princeton University, he taught at the University of Chicago until reaching the age of normal retirement. But partly at the initiative of his Chicago colleague Charles Morris, who had preceded him to a 'post-retirement' profes sorship at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and with the support of Eugene Wigner, he then received an appointment at that University, where he remained until his death in 1979. In Chicago, he organized a discussion group of scholars from that area as a kind of small scale model of the Vienna Circle, which met at his apart ment, where he lived with his first wife Janina, a mathematician. It was during this Chicago period that the functional disturbances from his illness were pronounced and not infrequent. The very unfortunate result was that colleagues who had no prior knowledge of the caliber of his writings in Polish and French or of his very considerable intellectual powers, had little incentive to read his published work, which he had begun to write in English.
The Law of Causality and Its Limits
Author: Philipp Frank
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2012-12-06
Total Pages: 366
ISBN-13: 940115516X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Law of Causality and its Limits was the principal philosophical work of the physicist turned philosopher, Philipp Frank. Born in Vienna on March 20, 1884, Frank died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 21, 1966. He received his doctorate in 1907 at the University of Vienna in theoretical physics, having studied under Ludwig Boltzmann; his sub sequent research in physics and mathematics was represented by more than 60 scientific papers. Moreover his great success as teacher and expositor was recognized throughout the scientific world with publication of his collaborative Die Differentialgleichungen der Mechanik und Physik, with Richard von Mises, in 1925-27. Frank was responsible for the second volume, on physics, and especially noted for his authoritative article on classical Hamiltonian mechanics and optics. Among his earliest papers were those, beginning in 1908, devoted to special relativity, which together with general relativity and physical cosmology occupied him throughout his life. Already in 1907, Frank published his seminal paper 'Kausalgesetz und Erfahrung' ('Experience and the Law of Causality'), much later collected with a splendid selection of his essays on philosophy of science, in English (1941c and 1949g, in our Bibliography). Joining the first 'Vienna Circle' in the first decade of the 20th century, with Hans Hahn, mathematician, and Otto Neurath, sociologist and economist, and deeply influenced by studies of Ernst Mach's critical conceptual histories of science and by the striking challenge of Poincare and Duhem, Frank continued his epistemological investigations.
Fundamental Causation
Author: Christopher Gregory Weaver
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-08-06
Total Pages: 372
ISBN-13: 1315449072
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFundamental Causation addresses issues in the metaphysics of deterministic singular causation, the metaphysics of events, property instances, facts, preventions, and omissions, as well as the debate between causal reductionists and causal anti-reductionists. The book also pays special attention to causation and causal structure in physics. Weaver argues that causation is a multigrade obtaining relation that is transitive, irreflexive, and asymmetric. When causation is singular, deterministic and such that it relates purely contingent events, the relation is also universal, intrinsic, and well-founded. He shows that proper causal relata are events understood as states of substances at ontological indices. He then proves that causation cannot be reduced to some non-causal base, and that the best account of that relation should be unashamedly primitivist about the dependence relation that underwrites its very nature. The book demonstrates a distinctive realist and anti-reductionist account of causation by detailing precisely how the account outperforms reductionist and competing anti-reductionist accounts in that it handles all of the difficult cases while overcoming all of the general objections to anti-reductionism upon which other anti-reductionist accounts falter. This book offers an original and interesting view of causation and will appeal to scholars and advanced students in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of physics.
