Page "Causality" Paragraph 15

With the end of the Middle Ages however, Aristotle's approach, especially concerning formal and final causes, was criticized by authors such as Niccolò Machiavelli, in the field of political thinking, and Francis Bacon, concerning science more generally.

A widely used modern definition of causality was originally given by David Hume.

He denied that we can ever perceive cause and effect, except by developing a habit or custom of mind where we come to associate two types of object or event, always contiguous and occurring one after the other.

In Part III, section XV, Hume expanded this to a list of eight ways of judging whether two things might be cause and effect.

The first three: