Causality and Action

Abstract

I want to raise some questions about Professor von Wright’s treatment of the relationship between the causal explanation of events and the concept of human action. One of his main aims is to show the relation between the concept of ‘Humean causation’ (meaning by this no more than a causal relation in which “cause and effect are logically independent of one another” (cf. Explanation and Understanding, London 1971, p. 93) without commitment to Hume’s regularity view) and the concept of human action. Two of the most important conclusions that he works towards are that human action cannot be fully explained in terms of Humean causation and that the concept of Humean causation itself depends on the possibility of human action, conceived in a teleological way.