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Ideas for 'Ethical Studies', 'works' and 'The Actual and the Possible'

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26. Natural Theory / D. Laws of Nature / 9. Counterfactual Claims
An event causes another just if the second event would not have happened without the first [Lewis, by Psillos]
     Full Idea: Lewis gives an account of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals (roughly, an event c causes an event e iff if c had not happened then e would not have happened either).
     From: report of David Lewis (works [1973]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation Intro
     A reaction: This feels wrong to me. It is a version of Humean constant conjunction, but counterfactuals are too much a feature of our minds, and not sufficiently a feature of the world, to do this job. Tricky.