Clatterbaugh The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy:
11/19/07: Clatterbaugh, Kenneth C. The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy 1671-1739 (New York: Routledge, 1999)
Descartes plays an important role within the causation debate in the Modern period. However, Descartes is notoriously obscure about the nature of causation. Although obscurity regarding the nature of causation marks Descartes writings, he nonetheless represents the beginning of the modern causation debate, and he transforms thinking regarding causation. Hume represents the culmination of the debate, especially as regarding the simplification, the secularization, and the epistemological treatment of causation.
According to Clatterbaugh, three major transitions occur during the roughly one hundred years, 1671-1739, of the modern causation debate regarding the nature of causation. First, the notion of causation is simplified. Second, the notion of causation is secularized. Third, the concern of the causation debate is changed from the metaphysical problem of causation to the attempt to identify true causal connections. These three major transitions could also be construed in the following manner: the early debate (the second third of the seventeenth century); the scientifically impacted debate (the later third of the seventeenth century); and the later debate (the first third of the eighteenth century). The seventeenth century is marked by a notion of cause that is so metaphysically restricted that it is almost of no value for scientific explanation, as the occasionalist philosophy that predominates this period makes God the only true cause in nature. By the end of the seventeenth century, most of these restrictions have been removed, with the resulting effect of rendering the notion of causation as almost being too broad and generous for it to be useful within scientific explanation.