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Instructors: Prof. Dr. Thomas Krödel; Prof. Dr. Vera Eva Tröger
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
English
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 23
Comments/contents:
Causation seems to be among the fundamental features of the world. We take ourselves to know that smoking causes cancer, that colliding with an iceberg caused the Titanic to sink, and that an asteroid caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. But what do these claims mean? And how do we find out about them? In the seminar, we'll look at causation from two points of view. We'll investigate how the notion can be analyzed philosophically, and we'll examine how causal conclusions can (and cannot) be drawn from empirical data. Our focus will be on so-called difference-making or counterfactual approaches to causation, which have been at the centre of the debate both in philosophy and in the applied disciplines in recent decades.
Information and material for this course will be provided via OpenOlat.
Literature:
Introductory readings:
Fenton-Glynn, Luke. 2021. Causation. Cambridge Elements. Cambridge New York (N.Y.): Cambridge University Press.
Pearl, Judea, and Dana Mackenzie. 2018. The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. New York: Basic Books.
Imbens, Guido W., and Donald B. Rubin. Causal Inference in Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
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