Abstract

Since David Lewis first published "Causation" it has been a widely accepted dogma that the most straightforward counterfactual analysis of causation cannot succeed, because of a class of counterexamples which, following Lewis's nomenclature, have come to be called cases of "preemption". Consequently, there has been a debate amongst philosophers including Tim Maudlin, Paul Horwich, Jonathan Bennett, David Armstrong, Martin Bunzl, Douglas Ehring, Ned Hall, Michael McDermott, Richard Miller, Murali Ramachandran, Laurie Paul, Jonathan Schaffer, and others, about how to respond to this "fact". I argue that this debate is premature, since the naive analysis has not been refuted, or been shown to conflict with any intuitions that deserve to be respected. There is no such thing as preemption