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Suppose an event occurs that has a causal chain preceding it. For example, the cause of my existence may be my mother. Her cause of existence may be my grandmother and so on.

If we represent a causal chain as a series of causes that lead up to a particular event, which events or groups of events in that causal chain act as an explanation for the event? Only the most recent preceding causal element? The second previous? The entire causal chain? Or what?

My suspicion is that this is a matter of semantics but I’m wondering how philosophers have responded to this

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    Yeah, my inclination is that this is a matter of semantics, but certainly there's writing about it. SEP might have some good references. A potentially salient example is the merlin/morgana one (a relevant as a counterexample to the counterfactual definition)
    – Kaia
    Commented yesterday
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    "this is partially or fully a matter of semantics" - pretty much. Reality doesn't fit neatly into the little boxes made up by one species on some tiny planet in the middle of nowhere in particular.
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented yesterday
  • @NotThatGuy true!
    – Syed
    Commented yesterday
  • Indeed if you always look up to the blue Platonic-like formal realm above your physical head, you cannot know the causal history or those particularly sought-after causal event of any of your interest in the same horizontal world as yours on earth even in the local past. Causality aka Dharma is extremely mystical as hinted and passionately sought after by Democritus and Plato's single realm is insufficient to cause the issue resolved. If you only dwell in Western philosophy, then perhaps a better question is which western philosopher(s) truly grounded cause in the modern non-mystic sense?...
    – Double Knot
    Commented yesterday
  • As a reference request, "which philosophers wrote something about causation?" Seems ridiculous. All if them did.
    – tkruse
    Commented 5 hours ago

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One traditional conception of factual causation considers counterfactuals (see Judea Pearl, Causality; see also Hart and Honoré, Causation in the Law).

This is "but-for" causation. If B would not have occured but for A, then A is said to be a cause of B.

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    +1: this :) It's also the dominant form of causation in law
    – Annika
    Commented 9 hours ago
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If any single one of your ancestors all the way back to LUCA, our last universal common ancestor, a tiny protozoan swimming around in the primordial seas, had died before they procreated, you would't have been around to ask that question.

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For such questions it may help to use a formal model based on elementary structures from graph theory.

  1. A simple example is a family tree: It is a directed graph with vertices of two types f = female and m = male. Each vertex “member” has a subgraph named “parents(member)” formed by ”member” and two vertices “father(member)” and “mother(member)” of corresponding type, together with two directed arcs originating from “member”.

  2. The family tree is a binary tree. It shows for each member its parents-relation and its ancestors-relation: Iterating the parents-relation, i.e. taking the transitive closure of the parents-relation, gives the ancestors-relation.

    Analogously one obtains for a simple case of causality a model of the structures “direct causal”-relation and “causal”-relation.

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