author : Mario Bunge

Non-technical and clearly written, this book focuses on the ontological problem of causality, with specific emphasis on the place of the causal principle in modern science. The author first defines the terminology employed and describes various formulations of the causal principle. He then examines the two primary critiques of causality, the empiricist and the romantic, as a prelude to the detailed explanation of the actual assertions of causal determinism. Finally, Dr. Bunge analyzes the function of the causal principle in science, touching on such subjects as scientific law, scientific explanation, and scientific prediction. Included, also, is an appendix that offers specific replies to questions and criticisms raised upon the publication of the first edition.

This book and its companion, namely Volume 4 of our Treatise, concern the basic traits and patterns of the real world. Their joint title could well be The Structure of Reality. They constitute then a work in ontology, metaphysics, philosophical cosmology, or general theory of systems. Our work is in line with an old and noble if maligned tradition: that of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Helvetius, d’Holbach, Lotze, Engels, Peirce, Russell, and Whitehead. But at the same time it departs from tradition in the matter of method. In fact our aim is to take the rich legacy of ontological problems and hints bequeathed us by traditional metaphysics, add to it the ontological presuppositions of contemporary scientific research, top it with new hypotheses compatible with the science of the day, and elaborate the whole with the help of some mathematical tools.

The end result of our research is, like that of many a metaphysical venture in the past, a conceptual system. It is hoped that this system will not be ridiculously at variance with reason and experience. It is intended moreover to be both exact and scientific: exact in the sense that the theories composing it have a definite mathematical structure, and scientific in that these theories be consistent with and moreover rather close to science – or rather the bulk of science. Furthermore, to the extent that we succeed in our attempt, science and ontology will emerge not as disjoint but as overlapping. The sciences are regional ontologies and ontology is general science. After all, every substantive scientific problem is a subproblem of the problem of ontology, to wit, What is the world like?

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This volume continues and concludes the task begun in Part I, titled The Furniture of the World – namely the building of an exact and systematic ontology consistent with contemporary science. However, it can be read independently by anyone willing to take for granted the basic notions analyzed and systematized in the companion volume, namely those of substance, property, thing, possibility, change, space, and time.

The three main themes of this book are wholeness (or systemicity), variety, and change. These three notions are analyzed and systematized, and they occur in some of the main assumptions of our ontology. One of these hypotheses is that the universe is not a heap of things but a thing composed of interconnected things – i.e. a system. This supersystem 1s composed of subsystems of various kinds: physical, biological, social, etc. Only physical systems may be composed of things that are not themselves systems, such as elementary particles and field quanta. However, even nonsystems are components of some system or other, and every system but the universe is a subsystem of some system: there are no strays. Ours is, in sum, a world of interconnected systems. Moreover it is the only one.

Another postulate of this system of ontology is that concrete systems are not all alike except insofar as they are systems and therefore tractable with the help of a unifying systems-theoretic framework. There are different kinds of system and each is characterized by its own peculiar properties and laws. Surely we sometimes succeed in accounting for the emergence and the history of a system in terms of its composition, environment, and structure. Nevertheless, explaining need not be explaining away: explained systems are not heaps, explained emergence is no mere resultant, and explained novelty is not old. Systemicity, emergence, and qualitative novelty and variety are as genuine as they are capable of being explained. Far from being incompatible with reason, wholeness and emergence can be understood.

A third major thesis of this work is that no system, except for the world as a whole, lasts forever. Systems get assembled, change, and break down. If natural, systems emerge as a result of self-assembly processes – often from debris of former systems. Even modest accretion processes can ensue in systems possessing emergent properties. Order can thus emerge from randomness, systems from physical precursors, living systems from nonliving ones, and so on. (Entropy need not increase in open systems.)

All three theses are by now common knowledge or nearly so. Now they – jointly with many others – have become part and parcel of a science-oriented ontological system couched in a fairly exact language. Thus the novelty of this system resides sometimes in its components, and at other times in their organization.

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