PHIL 110 · Metaphysics — Causation and Necessary Connection

Led by David Hume

The sixth module of the Cambridge Part IA Metaphysics paper, led by David Hume. We think causes necessitate their effects — but Hume asks to be shown the necessity, and finds only one event followed by another, again and again. The module traces his reduction of causation to constant conjunction, the relocation of necessity to a habit of the mind, the problem of induction that leaves all science resting on custom, the bundle theory of the self, and the naturalism by which Hume proposes we live with the result.

1. Module 6 ○ Open

   Causation and Necessary Connection

   Led by David Hume

   The question

   When one thing causes another, we think the cause *makes* the effect happen — that given the cause, the effect *must* follow. But where is that necessity? Hume looks at the closest causal sequence he can find and observes one event, then another, and the two joined together time after time — and never the connection itself. The module follows his case that causation, stripped to what we can actually observe, is just constant conjunction, that the necessity we feel is a habit of mind projected onto the world, and that the inductive leap from past to future — on which every science depends — has no foundation in reason at all. The same scrutiny, turned on the self, finds only a bundle of passing perceptions; and Hume closes by asking how, knowing all this, we are to live.

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