Cause

Summary

Dominique Pagani links cause to the cause-effect pair that governs the natural sciences, whether causality there is mechanical or statistical, and which is written as a functional dependence y = f(x)12. For him, this relation is temporal and transitive: the cause comes before the effect. He contrasts it with the relation of sign to meaning, which is immanent, like the meaning of a dream that runs through it3. He sees in this determinism of natural things the total negation of freedom. According to him, in natural inertia there are only effects, and only a subject can be an effective cause4. With Plato's Phaedo, he distinguishes the cause from "that without which the cause would never be a cause": bones and muscles, matter, sounds in the case of music5. He also brings up Aristotle's four causes, the critique of Hume, for whom causality is a subjective link, and the gap between correlation and causality6.

1. 1#1.4 Between crisis and war: philosophising?10 Dec 2015 · 35:46
2. 2#9.13 How can sciences of history be real?29 Jan 2021 · 20:31
3. 3#9.24 “Ruled like music paper!” Nerval, Baudelaire (part 2)30 Jun 2021 · 9:07
4. 4#5.9 Kafka, “An Imperial Message”29 Jul 2019 · 25:54
5. 5#15 Plato, Rousseau, Hegel and music9 Feb 2021 · 1:25:35
6. 6#9.21 Science and/or philosophy of “artificial intelligence”12 May 2021 · 43:32

Summary produced automatically from 14 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.