The Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to the Public Defense of the PhD Dissertation
by
Elena Popa
on
Causation as Manipulability and Temporal Direction
Supervisor: Ferenc Huoranszki
Members of the Defense Committee:
Federica Russo (University of Amsterdam)
Maria Kronfeldner (CEU)
Chair: David Weberman
Abstract
This dissertation is an investigation on the relation between causation, manipulability and temporal direction. One of the subject areas under investigations is mainly metaphysically-oriented and concerns the possibility of defending causal realism from the framework of a manipulability approach to causation. The other concerns the usefulness (or 'functional' aspect) of such theory with respect to causal reasoning and causal learning. On both metaphysical and epistemic contexts there seems to be a close relationship between causation and temporal direction. Starting from this claim, I am suggesting that the manipulationist perspective can be connected with an explanation of the asymmetry of causation in terms of temporal direction.