Thing causation

Abstract

According to orthodoxy, the most fundamental kind of causation involves one event causing another event. I argue against this event-causal view. Instead, the most fundamental kind of causation is thing causation, which involves a thing causing a thing to do something. Event causation is reducible to thing causation, but thing causation is not reducible to event causation, because event causation cannot accommodate cases of fine-grained causation. I defend my view from objections, including C. D. Broad's influential “timing” argument, and I conclude with implications for agent-causal theories of free will.