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This pioneering work is the first to trace how our understanding of the causes of human behavior has changed radically over the course of European and American cultural history since 1830. Focusing on the act of murder, as documented vividly by more than a hundred novels including Crime and Punishment, An American Tragedy, The Trial, and Lolita, Stephen Kern devotes each chapter of A Cultural History of Causality to examining a specific causal factor or motive for murder--ancestry, childhood, language, sexuality, emotion, mind, society, and ideology. In addition to drawing on particular novels, each chapter considers the sciences (genetics, endocrinology, physiology, neuroscience) and systems of thought (psychoanalysis, linguistics, sociology, forensic psychiatry, and existential philosophy) most germane to each causal factor or motive. Kern identifies five shifts in thinking about causality, shifts toward increasing specificity, multiplicity, complexity, probability, and uncertainty. He argues that the more researchers learned about the causes of human behavior, the more they realized how much more there was to know and how little they knew about what they thought they knew. The book closes by considering the revolutionary impact of quantum theory, which, though it influenced novelists only marginally, shattered the model of causal understanding that had dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century. Others have addressed changing ideas about causality in specific areas, but no one has tackled a broad cultural history of this concept as does Stephen Kern in this engagingly written and lucidly argued book.

History of civilization --- Literature --- anno 1900-1999 --- anno 1800-1899 --- #KVHA:Literaire kritiek --- #KVHA:Causaliteit --- #KVHA:Moord --- #KVHA:Thematische literatuurstudie --- Causation in literature. --- Causation. --- Fiction --- Murder in literature. --- History and criticism. --- Causality --- Cause and effect --- Effect and cause --- Final cause --- Beginning --- God --- Metaphysics --- Philosophy --- Necessity (Philosophy) --- Teleology --- Causation --- Causation in literature --- Murder in literature --- History and criticism

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One philosophical approach to causation sees counterfactual dependence as the key to the explanation of causal facts: for example, events c (the cause) and e (the effect) both occur, but had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. The counterfactual analysis of causation became a focus of philosophical debate after the 1973 publication of the late David Lewis's groundbreaking paper, "Causation," which argues against the previously accepted "regularity" analysis and in favor of what he called the "promising alternative" of the counterfactual analysis. Thirty years after Lewis's paper, this book brings together some of the most important recent work connecting--or, in some cases, disputing the connection between--counterfactuals and causation, including the complete version of Lewis's Whitehead lectures, "Causation as Influence," a major reworking of his original paper. Also included is a more recent essay by Lewis, "Void and Object," on causation by omission. Several of the essays first appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Philosophy, but most, including the unabridged version of "Causation as Influence," are published for the first time or in updated forms. Other topics considered include the "trumping" of one event over another in determining causation; de facto dependence; challenges to the transitivity of causation; the possibility that entities other than events are the fundamental causal relata; the distinction between dependence and production in accounts of causation; the distinction between causation and causal explanation; the context-dependence of causation; probabilistic analyses of causation; and a singularist theory of causation.

Causation. --- Counterfactuals (Logic) --- Causality. --- Causation --- Enabling Factors --- Multifactorial Causality --- Multiple Causation --- Predisposing Factors --- Reinforcing Factors --- Causalities --- Causalities, Multifactorial --- Causality, Multifactorial --- Causation, Multiple --- Causations --- Causations, Multiple --- Enabling Factor --- Factor, Enabling --- Factor, Predisposing --- Factor, Reinforcing --- Factors, Enabling --- Factors, Predisposing --- Factors, Reinforcing --- Multifactorial Causalities --- Multiple Causations --- Predisposing Factor --- Reinforcing Factor --- Contrary-to-fact conditional --- Counterfactual conditionals --- Causality --- Cause and effect --- Effect and cause --- Final cause --- Conditionals (Logic) --- Logic --- Beginning --- God --- Metaphysics --- Philosophy --- Necessity (Philosophy) --- Teleology --- PHILOSOPHY/General