The Nature of Causation: A Free Online Course from Oxford

From Mar­i­anne Tal­bot (Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty) comes a short course on The Nature of Cau­sa­tion. It cov­ers the fol­low­ing ground:

We have causal the­o­ries of ref­er­ence, per­cep­tion, knowl­edge, con­tent and numer­ous oth­er things. If it were to turn out that cau­sa­tion doesn’t exist, we would be in seri­ous trou­ble! Cau­sa­tion is so impor­tant in fact that it has been said that: “With regard to our total con­cep­tu­al appa­ra­tus, cau­sa­tion is the cen­tre of the cen­tre”, and it has been called called ‘the cement of the uni­verse’. In these lec­tures you will be intro­duced to the most influ­en­tial the­o­ries of cau­sa­tion, the moti­va­tions for them and argu­ments behind them, and the prob­lems they face.

This 6‑lecture course will be added to our list of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

You can find the audio avail­able in oth­er for­mats here.