For All Your Causal Counterfactual Needs

by Kieran Healy on July 20, 2004

New from MIT Press comes “_Causation and Counterfactuals_”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262532565/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, an anthology edited by “John Collins”:http://collins.philo.columbia.edu/, “Ned Hall”:http://web.mit.edu/philos/www/hall.html and “L.A. Paul”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul. At the “Pacific APA”:http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/divisions/pacific/ meetings, the latter was recently identified, much to her disgust, as “Kieran Healy from Crooked Timber’s wife.” _Causation and Counterfactuals_ presents the best recent work on the “counterfactual analysis of causation”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/, which helps us understand the metaphysical underpinnings of sentences like “If you don’t buy it you’ll be sorry,” “If I hadn’t blogged so much my own book would be finished by now,” and “If everyone on CT posted a shameless plug simultaneously, who’d be responsible?” The book is also perhaps the only place to read the full, gripping saga of “Billy and Suzy”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=billy+suzy+counterfactual&btnG=Search, a tale of “passion”:http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/advert.html, “overdetermination”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/ney/overdetermination_and_mental_causation.pdf, “war”:http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:DtIwbmQeUTcJ:web.syr.edu/~edhiddle/Hiddleston%2520Causal%2520Powers%2520web.pdf+billy+suzy+war+causation&hl=en, “double prevention”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul/papers/causation-preemption.pdf and “appalling violence”:http://philosophy.wisc.edu/eells/papers/ptprevmay01webver.PDF.

{ 10 comments }

1

Matt 07.20.04 at 5:14 am

Due to my poor reading skills (or some freudian story we’ll not go in to) I thought at first the book offered a story of Double _perversion_. I thought “I am _there_!” Now that I see it’s just some boring story relating semantics and metaphysics, you can forget it.

2

Matt 07.20.04 at 5:18 am

I take what I said just now about forgetting it all back. I’ve just seen from the Amazon page that people who bought this book also bought books by, “Vogue Knitting Magazine Editors”, so obviously it can’t be all bad.

3

John Quiggin 07.20.04 at 5:28 am

I’m hard at work on an analysis of the Billy-Suzy crisis, which I plan to release to a stunned world sometime soon. I guess I can identify myself as LA Paul’s husband’s coblogger.

4

Ian 07.20.04 at 11:33 am

Posting from a different PC I couldn’t get the trackback to work so her is my, no doubt naive, speculations on one aspect of this question.

http://ibanda.blogs.com/panchromatica/2004/07/causation_and_c.html

Anyone who knows more than me about this (ie everyone) please do tell me if I’ve completely missed the point won’t you?

5

Aidan Kehoe 07.20.04 at 2:07 pm

Technical nit-pick: as is very uncharacteristic of web apps, MT Did The Right Thing with your google link, and since you had pre-compensated for its expected breakage, stuff got encoded twice, and the link is broken.

6

Timothy Burke 07.20.04 at 3:21 pm

Oo, great. Off to Amazon for me!

7

ian 07.20.04 at 4:55 pm

Technical nit-pick

If thats me I didn’t do nuffin! all I did was cut and paste the link.

8

Ophelia Benson 07.20.04 at 6:24 pm

Okay so that’s my causal counterfactual needs taken care of but now what about my casual counterfactual needs eh? What about them then eh?

9

Matt Weiner 07.20.04 at 8:21 pm

At the Pacific APA meetings, the latter was recently identified, much to her disgust, as “Kieran Healy from Crooked Timber’s wife.”
Oh dear. Not by me, I hope.

10

VJ 07.21.04 at 10:23 am

Does Doc Edgerton get credit for that cover photo?

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