Editing Causality (section)

==== History ====
In the discussion of history, events are sometimes considered as if in some way being agents that can then bring about other historical events. Thus, the combination of poor harvests, the hardships of the peasants, high taxes, lack of representation of the people, and kingly ineptitude are among the ''causes'' of the [[French Revolution]]. This is a somewhat [[Plato]]nic and [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegelian]] view that [[Concretization|reifies]] causes as [[Ontology|ontological entities]]. In Aristotelian terminology, this use approximates to the case of the ''efficient'' cause.

Some philosophers of history such as [[Arthur Danto]] have claimed that "explanations in history and elsewhere" describe "not simply an event—something that happens—but a change".<ref>Danto, Arthur (1965) ''Analytical Philosophy of History'', 233.</ref> Like many practicing historians, they treat causes as intersecting actions and sets of actions which bring about "larger changes", in Danto's words: to decide "what are the elements which persist through a change" is "rather simple" when treating an individual's "shift in attitude", but "it is considerably more complex and metaphysically challenging when we are interested in such a change as, say, the break-up of feudalism or the emergence of nationalism".<ref>Danto, Arthur (1965) ''Analytical Philosophy of History'', 249.</ref>

Much of the historical debate about causes has focused on the relationship between communicative and other actions, between singular and repeated ones, and between actions, structures of action or group and institutional contexts and wider sets of conditions.<ref>Hewitson, Mark (2014) ''History and Causality'', 86–116.</ref> [[John Lewis Gaddis|John Gaddis]] has distinguished between exceptional and general causes (following [[Marc Bloch]]) and between "routine" and "distinctive links" in causal relationships: "in accounting for what happened at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, we attach greater importance to the fact that President Truman ordered the dropping of an atomic bomb than to the decision of the Army Air Force to carry out his orders."<ref>Gaddis, John L. (2002), ''The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past'', 64.</ref> He has also pointed to the difference between immediate, intermediate and distant causes.<ref>Gaddis, John L. (2002), ''The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past'', 95.</ref> For his part, Christopher Lloyd puts forward four "general concepts of causation" used in history: the "metaphysical idealist concept, which asserts that the phenomena of the universe are products of or emanations from an omnipotent being or such final cause"; "the empiricist (or [[Humeanism#Causality and necessity|Humean]]) regularity concept, which is based on the idea of causation being a matter of constant conjunctions of events"; "the functional/teleological/consequential concept", which is "goal-directed, so that goals are causes"; and the "realist, structurist and dispositional approach, which sees relational structures and internal dispositions as the causes of phenomena".<ref>Lloyd, Christopher (1993) ''Structures of History'', 159.</ref>