The Powers That Be

Extract

In the March 1971 issue of Dialogue Professors E.H. Madden and P.H. Hare attempt with much ingenuity and resource to resuscitate a pre-Humean theory of causal connection. Firmly disowning the “epistemological and metaphysical disasters” that have led to “terrible consequences”, (such as an appeal to volitional efficacy, Humean associationism, etc.), and making only a mildly favourable gesture in the direction of Michotte, they yet claim that the defence of Hume by modern regularists, even when abetted by the weapons of phenomenology, can be refuted by such indubitable facts as that we observe avalanches destroying villages, waves eating away the shoreline and the “wind-bending-the-trees” (pp. 17f).