I love a taxonomy, particularly a philosophical taxonomy, although I am not fond of philosophy. One of my favorite bits of my high school philosophy class was when we talked about Aristotle’s ideas about the four different types of causes (material, efficient, formal, and telic/final). Peter Rabin incorporates and expands upon the Aristotelian model, pulling in ideas about causation from Galileo and Kant and other thinkers from history, to produce a complicated (but well-articulated) set of models for thinking about cause. His thinking accounts for a wide variety of causes, from straightforward, yes/no (what he calls categorical) causes like A…
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