From Causality to Predeterministic-Historicity (PDH)

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Groundwork for a New Kind of African Metaphysics
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Abstract

In this chapter, I reconceptualize the idea of causality in a way that fits into the system of predeterministic historicity (PDH) that I am building. In this chapter, I reflect on the dependence on spirituality and relationality in the dominant accounts of causality in African metaphysics. Finding them inadequate in their present guise, I introduce a more plausible account of what we term causality. This new account sheds the baggage of mythicism and spiritualism and, instead, focuses on the direct and indirect interactive relationships among things in the world, as well as the deterministic relationship between previous states of affairs and a particular outcome, as what constitutes what is generally refer to as causality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Asouzu opines that all of reality is interconnected and mutually dependent. Therefore, every aspect of reality necessarily serves as a missing link of reality.

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Attoe, A.D. (2022). From Causality to Predeterministic-Historicity (PDH). In: Groundwork for a New Kind of African Metaphysics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91109-6_4

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