Analysis Advance Access published online on September 24, 2009
Analysis, doi:10.1093/analys/anp126
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Backwards causation still impossible
Central European University 1051 Budapest, Hungary benyamih@ceu.hu
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I criticize Roache's attempt (2009), in response to an earlier paper of mine (2007), to defend the possibility of backwards causation.
In my paper ‘The Impossibility of Backwards Causation’ (2007), I discussed and rejected some arguments, advanced by Dummett (1964) and Tooley (1997), for the possibility of an effect preceding its cause, an alleged possibility often called ‘backwards causation’ in the literature. Among other things, I discussed there two scenarios described by these philosophers, in which the world is divided into two sets of causal processes that occur in opposite temporal directions. That is, relative to the events of the one set, the effects of the other set precede their causes; and vice-versa.
This last claim presupposes that there is some way in which the temporal relations between events of the different sets are determined. Both Dummett and Tooley correctly realized that these relations cannot be