The aim of the project and its development during the project period

The aim was to clarify and resolve a problem at the heart of contemporary so-called ‘powers-based’ views about the connection between properties, causation, and the uniformity/lawfulness of nature. These views will be referred to as causal realism. The core problem is that causal realists assume today, and always have, that all influence is unidirectional; that it involves en entity with active powers (the agent) exerting an influence on another entity with the passive power to receive the influence (the patient). As the Primary Investigator (PI) has previously pointed out—and before him, Mario Bunge—then the natural sciences do not recognise any forms of unidirectional action; all influence comes in the form of reciprocal actions, or interactions. If this is right, contemporary causal realism may be seriously biased, in a way that may have detrimental effects on the characterisation of properties (powers), causation, and how these relate to the uniformity/lawfulness of nature. The project not only aims to call attention to this problem but also develop a powers-based account that is compatible with the natural sciences, notably the PI’s account of causal production in terms of interaction.

The project has run mostly according to plan, except that two separately formulated research questions (about causal necessity and about uniformity of nature) have merged into one, and that it now also addresses the question of whether the PI’s views on causation can offer a causal account of the constitution of material objects and how they persist over time.

A comment on how the project was carried out

In the first half of the project, the PI completed drafts to three papers—”An Aristotelian Defense of Causal Necessity”, ”A Critique of Counterfactual Theories of Causation”, and ”Substance and Process; Contrary or Complementary Views?”—and started work on a monography. Getting the papers accepted turned out to be a slow process, so it was decided to change the publication strategy and focus on writing the monograph. However, the PI was invited to contribute to two anthologies, and used the opportunity to write two spin-off articles that build on the monograph.

The PI spent 7 months as Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford between 1 December 2014 and 30 June 2015, on an invitation from Prof. Anna Marmodoro to join in the activities of two of her projects, Power Structuralism in Ancient Ontologies and The Metaphysics of Entanglement. The projects organised activities every week—reading groups, work in progress seminars, and talks by visiting speakers. The PI acted as moderator at a number of seminars, commentator at a work shop, and gave a talk in the Visiting Speaker Series. The planned cooperation with the Durham Emergence Project in the end resulted only to participation as speaker in one conference organized by the project.

The three most important results and contributions to the cutting edge of research internationally

In this project, the PI has revealed very interesting turns in the conceptual history of the philosophical concept of ‘causal influence’ until today, which sheds new light on the contemporary revival of causal realism. For instance, it explains why causal realists are now finding it difficult to develop the notion of causal production. The PI suggests that it is because they are trying to model causal influence on a model of causation they believe to belong to the causal realist tradition, but is really to a great extent based on the empiricist conception of causation, which was inherently reductive with respect to causal influence. I have called this model ‘relational realism’ and have traced its introduction into the debate about causal realism back to Russell’s paper ‘On the Notion of Cause’ (1913). The PI suggests that the best way to arrive at an intelligible notion of causal production, is to reject relational realism and revert to the older model in which causal influence is exerted between persisting particulars not events. Even better, to preferably adopt the PI’s modernised version of causal production as interaction.

Another important find is that the case against the necessity of causal connections, now considered to be very strong, is largely a collection of straw man arguments. Hume’s argument against casual necessity is irrelevant to causal realism today because it is based on meta-philosophical concerns that hardly anybody accepts any more. Russell’s argument in his 1913 paper is only effective against the view Russell mistakenly identifies with causal realism— relational realism—which has never been defended as an intelligible account of causal necessity. Furthermore, the so-called argument from interference and prevention only addresses a similar empiricist conception of causal realism which no causal realist has ever defended. Finally, Mumford and Anjum’s adaptation of the argument from interference and prevention to powers-based accounts, only works if it is assumed that natural properties exercise their powers independently of the persistent particulars of which they are properties. Again, that is a view no-one has ever defended.

Finally, the project has confirmed that contemporary powers-based accounts do indeed assume the unidirectionality of causal influence and that this assumption influences their characterisation generally of the causal role of natural properties and makes them incompatible with the theories and findings of natural science. The PI is confident that his modernised version of the older causal realist model will be received with great interest in the philosophical community. Indeed, Anna Marmodoro has explicitly begun to address the problem (Marmodoro 2017), but so far defends the unidirectionality of causal influence (unsuccessfully, the PI argues).

New research questions generated by the project

As mentioned above, the attempt to develop a causal account of the constitution and persistence of material objects has been added to the project. That in turn has opened up some possibilities concerning the development of what is called presentism in the philosophy of time, the view that existence is confined to the present, the future doesn’t exist yet, the past no longer. This has led to the development of a research project—Presentism and the Problem of Cross-temporal relations—which the PI is now seeking funding for from the Swedish Research Council. The project involves collaboration with two other Swedish philosophers as well as philosophers in Notthingham (UK), Siegen (Germany), and Helsinki (Finland).

The international dimensions of the project

The PI was Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford from 1 December 2014 until 30 June 2015, where he exchanged ideas with two research groups, Power Structuralism in Ancient Ontologies and The Metaphysics of Entanglement, led by Prof. Anna Marmodoro. The PI was aso invited to contribute with a talk at the conference Emergence and Causation organised by the Durham Emergence Project in September 2015.

Together with Jani Hakkarainen och Markku Keinänen the PI organised a workshop on ”powers” at the University of Tampere, in March 2016. The PI was also invited to give talks on work in progress at the following conferences/workshops: The Metaphysics of Properties, University of Helsinki (mars 2015); the annual Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy (SIFA) (Sept. 2016); the annual meeting of the Nordic Network for Metaphysics at Kristianstad, Norway (Oct. 2016); Aristotle Resurgent: Exploring Neo-Aristotelian Approaches to Ethics, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh (May 2017); Logic and Philosophy of Time: Themes from Prior in Copenhagen (nov. 2017); Contemporary Perspectives on Aristotle’s Physics at the University of Lucerne (Jan. 2018); Change and Changemakers: New Perspectives on the Problem of Persistence in Köln (sept. 2018). The PI was also invited to talk at Yongsei University in Seoul in Nov. 2018, but had to cancel because of a death in the family.

Dissemination to other researchers and to groups outside the scientific community, as well as a comment on collaboration

So far the results of the project have mainly been disseminated through participation in conferences and workshops, where the PI has presented work in progress. The PI has also presented material in research seminars at Swedish institutions, e.g. in Stockholm, Södertörn, Lund, and Linköping, as well as at the ONTOFORMAT seminar in Metaphysics at the University of Milan. Although the PI has collaborated in the organization of workshops, none of the outputs are the result of collaboration. One article is accepted for publication in the volume Logic and Philosophy of Time: Themes from Prior, due to be published in 2019, and another is accepted to the volume Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift due to be published by Springer in 2019. The former volume will be Open Access, but a pre-print copy of the latter will be available on my Academia website. Three draft papers have been available on my Academia website for two years, but have been temporarily withdrawn because they are undergoing peer-review. The PI was interviewed by Richard Marshall for 3:am Magazine, and quite a sizable part of that interview concerned ongoing research in the project. The magazine addresses a general audience.