Reasons and Causes: The Philosophical Battle and The Meta-philosophical War

Abstract

‘Are the reasons for acting also the causes of action?’ When this question was asked in the early 1960s it received by and large a negative reply: ‘No, reasons are not causes’. Yet, when the same question ‘Are the reasons for acting the causes of action?’ is posed some twenty years later, the predominant answer is ‘Yes, reasons are causes’. How could one and the same question receive such diverging answers in the space of only a couple of decades? This paper argues that the shift from an anti-causalist to a causalist consensus is not fully accounted for by the results of first-order debates in the philosophy of action and is owing instead to a change in second-order meta-philosophical assumptions concerning the role and character of philosophical analysis.

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