Causal relations

Items in the world – people, objects, events, states of affairs, etc. – may bear different relations to one another. Thus any two people may be related as father to son, as master to slave, as lawyer to client, as teacher to student, or in many other ways. Relations are often the object of philosophical analysis. Part of our concern is with the nature of a relation, the emotion: object relation. We want to know what this relation consists in. That is, we want to know what it is for two items in the world to be related as emotion to object. In particular, we want to know whether this relation can properly be said to be a causal one. Not all relations are causal ones. For example, spatial and temporal relations, and relations of similarity and difference, are not. Is it a necessary condition for two items to be related as emotion to object that a certain kind of causal relation exist between them? Or is it the case, as Kenny claims, that the emotion: object relation cannot be analysed in causal terms? As the notion of cause is so central to my concern, I ought to begin by discussing it. In this chapter I shall give a brief account which is based on an article by Davidson. Davidson talks about one causal relation in particular, the cause: effect relation, but I shall suggest that other relations besides this can properly be called causal, and that there are forms of causal explanations of events which do not consist in citing a cause.