From the very beginnings of organised philosophical thought there has been a keen awareness of the problem of causality. In its most basic form this problem arises whenever the concept of freedom is considered. To be free is to be uncaused. This basic axiom has considerable implications. If we agree that ‘to be free is to be uncaused’ then it seems like we face two simple options as implications of this axiom. Either we deny that there is any such thing as freedom or we deny that cauality is universal. This simple axiom, that to be free is to be uncaused, produces a quite strange and difficult tension between these implications. On the one hand we might want to affirm freedom as real and present. In general we might want to go further and not only affirm the actual reality of freedom but also affirm it as something to be valued and retrieved in the face of its removal. On the other hand we want to affirm the capacity to know the world and the conection between the various facts of the world, connections of causality. Freedom breaks open the world, whilst causality constructs its’ connections and it would seem we want the strange mixture of freedom within a connected world. One of the basic responses to this type of tension has been to suggest that there are, in fact, two types of causes. Everything is thus connected through the concept of cause, but the connections are variable dependent on which of the two types of cause is in play. We thus reconcile freedom and cause by turning freedom into a type of causal force. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve been watching some of the YouTube videos posted by the TED group, including one presentation by Murray Gell-Man (he of The quark and the jaguar).  Most of the presentations at TED seem short and sweet, not a lot of technical detail but a good – if broad – explanation of an interesting concept enabling people to gain something like a ‘lay of the land’ within intellectual life.

One of the things Gell-Man was saying in his presentation which really struck home, however, was the role of accidents.  “The history of the universe is … co-determined by the basic law and an unimaginably long sequence of accidents (outcomes of chance events)” (Time: 4.59).  He re-emphasises this point at various places during the presentation, that accidents are crucial co-determinants of reality together with any basic law that exists.

For a long time I’ve been fascinated by a short and simple point made by Deleuze.  “It will be said that the essence is by nature the most important thing. This however, is precisely what is at issue: whether the notions of importance and non-importance are not precisely notions which concern events or accidents, and are much more ‘important’ within accidents than the crude opposition between essence and accident itself.” (DR, P189, Athlone edition)

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