Editing Causality (section)

==== After the Middle Ages ====
<!--[[David Hume]] links here-->
{{See also|Humean definition of causality}}
For Aristotelian philosophy before Aquinas, the word ''cause'' had a broad meaning. It meant 'answer to a why question' or 'explanation', and Aristotelian scholars recognized four kinds of such answers. With the end of the [[Middle Ages]], in many philosophical usages, the meaning of the word 'cause' narrowed. It often lost that broad meaning, and was restricted to just one of the four kinds. For authors such as [[Niccolò Machiavelli]], in the field of political thinking, and [[Francis Bacon]], concerning [[science]] more generally, Aristotle's moving cause was the focus of their interest. A widely used modern definition of causality in this newly narrowed sense was assumed by [[David Hume]].<ref name="The Thomist article"/> He undertook an epistemological and metaphysical investigation of the notion of moving cause. He denied that we can ever perceive cause and effect, except by developing a habit or custom of mind where we come to associate two types of object or event, always contiguous and occurring one after the other.<ref name=Hume/> In Part III, section XV of his book ''[[A Treatise of Human Nature]]'', Hume expanded this to a list of eight ways of judging whether two things might be cause and effect. The first three:

# "The cause and effect must be contiguous in space and time."
# "The cause must be prior to the effect."
# "There must be a constant union betwixt the cause and effect. 'Tis chiefly this quality, that constitutes the relation."
And then additionally there are three connected criteria which come from our experience and which are "the source of most of our philosophical reasonings": {{ordered list | start = 4
| "The same cause always produces the same effect, and the same effect never arises but from the same cause. This principle we derive from experience, and is the source of most of our philosophical reasonings."
| Hanging upon the above, Hume says that "where several different objects produce the same effect, it must be by means of some quality, which we discover to be common amongst them."
| And "founded on the same reason": "The difference in the effects of two resembling objects must proceed from that particular, in which they differ."}}
And then two more: {{ordered list | start = 7
| "When any object increases or diminishes with the increase or diminution of its cause, 'tis to be regarded as a compounded effect, deriv'd from the union of the several different effects, which arise from the several different parts of the cause."
| An "object, which exists for any time in its full perfection without any effect, is not the sole cause of that effect, but requires to be assisted by some other principle, which may forward its influence and operation."}}

In 1949, physicist [[Max Born]] distinguished determination from causality. For him, determination meant that actual events are so linked by laws of nature that certainly reliable predictions and retrodictions can be made from sufficient present data about them. He describes two kinds of causation: nomic or generic causation and singular causation. Nomic causality means that cause and effect are linked by more or less certain or probabilistic general laws covering many possible or potential instances; this can be recognized as a probabilized version of Hume's criterion 3. An occasion of singular causation is a particular occurrence of a definite complex of events that are physically linked by antecedence and contiguity, which may be recognized as criteria 1 and 2.<ref name="Born">[[Max Born|Born, M.]] (1949). [https://archive.org/details/naturalphilosoph032159mbp ''Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance''], Oxford University Press, London, p. 9.</ref>