Not all scientific explanations work by describing causal connections between events or the world's overall causal structure. Some mathematical proofs explain why the theorems being proved hold. In this book, Marc Lange proposes philosophical accounts of many kinds of non-causal explanations in science and mathematics. These topics have been unjustly neglected in the philosophy of science and mathematics. One important kind of non-causal scientific explanation is termed explanation by constraint. These explanations work by providing information about what makes certain facts especially inevitable - more necessary than the ordinary laws of nature connecting causes to their effects. Facts explained in this way transcend the hurly-burly of cause and effect. Many physicists have regarded the laws of kinematics, the great conservation laws, the coordinate transformations, and the parallelogram of forces as having explanations by constraint. This book presents an original account of explanations by constraint, concentrating on a variety of examples from classical physics and special relativity. This book also offers original accounts of several other varieties of non-causal scientific explanation. Dimensional explanations work by showing how some law of nature arises merely from the dimensional relations among the quantities involved. Really statistical explanations include explanations that appeal to regression toward the mean and other canonical manifestations of chance. Lange provides an original account of what makes certain mathematical proofs but not others explain what they prove. Mathematical explanation connects to a host of other important mathematical ideas, including coincidences in mathematics, the significance of giving multiple proofs of the same result, and natural properties in mathematics. Introducing many examples drawn from actual science and mathematics, with extended discussions of examples from Lagrange, Desargues, Thomson, Sylvester, Maxwell, Rayleigh, Einstein, and Feynman, Because Without Cause's proposals and examples should set the agenda for future work on non-causal explanation.

Not all scientific explanations work by describing causal connections between events or the world's overall causal structure. In addition, mathematicians regard some proofs as explaining why the theorems being proved do in fact hold. This book proposes new philosophical accounts of many kinds of non-causal explanations in science and mathematics.

A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence "Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality -- the study of cause and effect -- on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet; and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why.

What forms does explanation take if it is not based on causation? Fifteen leading philosophers explore this hot topic, arising from a shift in philosophical understanding of the nature of explanation which reflects actual explanatory practices in science, mathematics, and philosophy.

Tresia was murdered on March 21, 1992. She was in her BMW in a gas station parking lot, attempting to use a payphone to call her husband, who was three blocks away in his office building. Three gang members approached her car. One of those killers brandished a sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun. He then shot her, at point-blank range, through her driver window. The fired shot blew a hole through her driver's window and entered her body (just below her left arm and shoulder), exploding her heart. We were later informed that her husband, only one minute away, in his railroad employment office, drove to the gas station parking lot where Tresia was shot, removed her body from her car, then placed her in his truck, driving her the furthest distance until she died on the way to the nearest hospital, Jefferson Regional Medical Center, where she was pronounced DOA in the emergency room. Years of doubt, anger, and grief have crippled my family, leaving us with unanswered questions, hurt, and enormous loss. We felt that no one understood what we were going through. It seemed to us no one cared, and the ones that acted as if they did slowly fell away like leaves on a tree approaching fall season. We felt ostracized and discarded, like we had a disease. Even those who were close to us avoided our family. We felt very alone and isolated. We were suffering. We were grieving. We had no one to tell us what was about to unfold in our lives or how Tresia's murder was going to change the course of our lives. We didn't understand the anger that we were feeling. Each and every task we set out to accomplish seemed to have stumbling blocks in front of them. The Christian family we had once known and grown to love over the years washed away like waves in the sea and disappeared from our memories as well because they did not reach out to us in our time of mourning. This was an added loss to us because we believed they loved us, would be there for us if we ever needed them, and that they cared about us. Instead, they acted afraid, like they did not want to be involved. Some of my former friends acted as though they were thinking my family was cursed, and even stated in our presence that we possibly did something to anger God and that we were being punished, that perhaps God was unleashing his wrath on us. This couldn't have been further from the truth. Murdered without Cause was written with the sole intention(s) of sharing Tresia's story to help others in overcoming their loss of a loved one by murder. This book was also written to restore peace in my family to obtain a sense of closure that we never knew existed and to establish unspeakable justice by assisting survivors. The only way to cope with any loss by murder is to continue to pray and seek God's divine purpose for your own life. By reaching out to you, the survivor of a loved one murdered, I want you to know that you are not alone. There was no book written, in 1992, that could tell us how we were going to feel or what we were going to go through. With this writing, my wish is to guide you through the stages of shock, anger, and grief, so you are able to rediscover a hope that moves you forward out of your sorrow, courage to lift your journey and a vision to claim a new purpose in life.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

A social psychologist uncovers the psychological basis of the "laziness lie," which originated with the Puritans and has ultimately created blurred boundaries between work and life with modern technologies and offers advice for not succumbing to societal pressure to "do more."