ellauri079.html on line 303: Surprisingly, I use as an example of a free agent here a pingpong player. Presumably because my tennis-playing son has proved unsatisfactory. What I end up saying is distinguish agent causation from event causation. Futile squirming, it does not change anything.
ellauri096.html on line 136: Foundationalists reject (1). They take some propositions to be self-evident. Coherentists reject (2). They tolerate some forms of circular reasoning. For instance, Nelson Goodman (1965) has characterized the method of reflective equilibrium as virtuously circular. Charles Peirce (1933–35, 5.250) rejected (3), an approach later refined by Peter Klein (2007) and championed at book-length by Scott F. Aikin (2011). Infinitists believe that infinitely long chains of justification are no more impossible than infinitely long chains of causation. Finally, the epistemological anarchist rejects (4). As Paul Feyerabend refrains in Against Method, “Anything goes” (1988, vii, 5, 14, 19, 159).
ellauri100.html on line 479: Scientific causation: the belief that people’s actions are fully explained by a combination of biological and environmental forces
ellauri151.html on line 682: Munz (2000) discusses Wittgenstein’s reply to Frazer at length. Frazer argues that magic is based on loose associations that lead to erroneous views on causation. According to Munz, Wittgenstein holds that the distinction between beliefs and practices cannot be made, as language is at its core mythological.
xxx/ellauri174.html on line 67: Malebranche was giving in to laws of cause and effect by placing a greater emphasis than he had previously done on his occasionalist account of causation, and particularly on his contention that God acted for the most part through "general volitions" and only rarely, as in the case of miracles, through "particular volitions". Occasionalism is a philosophical doctrine about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God. The doctrine states that the illusion of efficient causation between mundane events arises out of God's causing of one event after another.
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