Abstract

In his book UNDERSTANDING HUMAN AGENCY (OUP 2011), Erasmus Mayr defends the idea of agent causation against various objections. The article, which is a commentary on a précis of Mayr’s book, argues that his defence is unsuccessful on a number of counts. Mayr claims that even inanimate substances possess and exert active causal powers, but he fails to give an acceptable criterion that demarcates active from passive powers. Secondly, his approach does not answer Broads datability objection, according to which causes must be datable in a way that only events can be. Thirdly, the explanation that substance-causation consists of the manifestation of causal powers falls short of providing truth conditions for singular causal statements.