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Full Idea
Since Mill it has been fairly common to explain causation one way or another in terms of 'necessary' and 'sufficient' conditions.
Clarification
Mill's book was 1843
Gist of Idea
Since Mill causation has usually been explained by necessary and sufficient conditions
Source
G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], §1)
Book Ref
'Causation', ed/tr. Sosa,E. /Tooley,M. [OUP 1993], p.90
A Reaction
Interesting to see what Hume implies about these criteria. Anscombe is going to propose that causal events are fairly self-evident and self-explanatory, and don't need analyses of conditions. Another approach is regularities and laws.
| 8351 | With diseases we easily trace a cause from an effect, but we cannot predict effects [Anscombe] |
| 8350 | Since Mill causation has usually been explained by necessary and sufficient conditions [Anscombe] |
| 8353 | Freedom involves acting according to an idea [Anscombe] |
| 8352 | To believe in determinism, one must believe in a system which determines events [Anscombe] |
| 10363 | Causation is relative to how we describe the primary relata [Anscombe, by Schaffer,J] |
| 4777 | The word 'cause' is an abstraction from a group of causal terms in a language (scrape, push..) [Anscombe] |