Once upon a time there were four aristotelian causes; then Hume came along and discredited final, formal, and material causes. By a ruthless process of elimination efficient causation simply became causation. And, while in the Treatise Hume modelled such causation on the template of then ruling mechanical (scientific) philosophy with its emphasis on contact between and regular succession of cause and effect, in the more mature first Enquiry (1748) he invented, as the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy claims with surprise ("surprisingly enough,"), the modern conception of causation by offering a counterfactual definition of it, "We may define a cause to be an object followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second. Or, in other words, where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.” Proving, once again, that lack of logical rigor need not prevent fertile insight.
The fairy tale is not wholly misleading. But note three caveats: first, final causes remained respectable throught the nineteenth century in various scientific contexts (not the least physics and biology). I leave aside to what degree teleology is still lurking in contemporary sciences.
Second, the reduction from four to one kind of cause hides the deployment of a whole range of 'funky' causes. Among the more prominent of these funky causes are (i) eminent causes, where qualities or properties of the effect are already contained in the cause.* Crucially, the cause and the effect are fundamentally unalike or differ in nature.* But also (ii) immanent causes that aim to capture the idea that some effects take place within the cause of them. In recent metaphysics such causes are understood as (free and) moral agents, but in Spinoza, immanent causation is a feature of the one and only substance (who is not well understood as a moral agent). The most controversial funky cause were causes that (iii) were simultaneous with their effects over enormous distances. Hume goes after this with an argument that, if succesful, would suggest that the existence of simultaneous cause-effect relations would undermine the very possibility of succession, and so no motion would be possible, "and all objects must be co-existent." (Treatise 1.2.3.7-8) And as the new science became organized it became very tempting to treat (iv) laws of nature as (second) causes.+ (This is especially prominent in those who denied occasionalism.)
A final example of what I have in mind here is (V) the significance of causes that can jump the invisible/visible or (insensible/sensible) barrier(s). The hidden causal sources are often called 'powers,' which are responsible for manifest effects. In fact, in the early modern period this is one of the main expanatory causal schemes. It's because this is scheme is so influential in the early modern period, that in the Treatise, Hume uses features of it to articulate the problem of induction, which, of course, even in Hume contains multiple problems of induction [recall here].
As an aside, which is also the implied moral of the fairy tale, that more than four causes were tried out during a fertile intellectual age like the early modern period is no surprise. For, if we want to distinguish and classify the great variety of differences that, in a sense, make a difference even Aristotle's four causes may seem too few. I suspect the historical path dependency of this fact -- a great variety of differences that make a difference were labeled a 'cause' -- has made it so elusive to offer a unified, semantic analysis of causation. Historically there have been many paradigmatic causes that really fit in different boxes. And so our contemporary, ingenious analysts can always generate a counter-example or find an intuitive challenge to any attempt to offer a hegemonic definition or analysis.**
The aside is really the third caveat. In so far as one notion of causation predominated (be it the regularity, counterfactual or manipulative view) in which the homogeneous causal-effect structure is fairly restrictive, but what can enter into the relata is rather permissive, this predominance re-opens the door to new kinds of causes that aim to track differences that make a difference not well served by such homogeneity, especially if these can be operationalized with new mathematical techniques and improved computing power falling in price. We can understand, say, probabilistic causation as one such example, and hybrids that we find in causal networks as another kind of example.
*Structurally that's very close to a formal cause, but the formal cause can be highly abstract entity or feature whereas the eminent cause need not be so. (Although confusingly an eminent cause can, in scholastic jargon, cause formally.) In addition, the content of a formal cause often is similar in nature to the effect (or features of it).
+Second because God would then be the first cause.
**Notice that my explanation here is compatible with Millgram's of the same challenge in The Great Endarkenment, but differs in emphasis.
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