Eric Watkins, Kant and the metaphysics of causality (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2005).
NOTE: all that I found truly worthwhile from this $99.00 book was the first few pages of introduction which speaks of the context of cans. (Since I care not for Kant per se). It does, I will copy, almost verbatim, the first several pages of the book. Know then, that what follows needs to be altered later order not to be considered plagiarism.
Philosophers of the modern period, such as Descartes and locke, attended to articulate a novel metaphysical account causality that could support the claims of the “new sciences” of mathematical physics and corpuscularianism discovered by Galileo, Newton, and Boyle. Descartes and John Locke, as founders of diametrically opposed schools of thought within philosophy (that is, rationalism and appears Susan, respectively), disagreed about many abstract and substantive issues––for example, the existence of innate ideas, and the role sensations, but their accounts of causality bull remarkable similarities (in part because of their common enemy, Aristotle). Indeed, both accounts involve purely quantitative properties and exact laws of nature that invoke only efficient/mechanistic causation in explaining how a cause brings about its effect, rather than qualitative features that occur “for the most part” and according to final/geological causes, as the Aristotelians held.
Typically, the view is that Descartes’s position came under attack from later rationalist, for example Malbranche, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, who objected that Descartes could not explain how causal relations obtained between mind and body, since they all are, in his account, distinct substances with radically different natures and thus they concluded that his attempt at giving a conference of account of causation ultimately failed. They then try to develop their own positive accounts of causation that would avoid this objection. Malbranche did so by denying finite substances could act it all, and by asserting that only independent substance––that is, God––could surely be a cause. Spinoza argued that mind and body are really distinct substances, but modes of one all-encompassing substance––that is, God––insomuch as causation between mind and body is a relation, not between substances with different natures, but rather between modes of a single substance. Finally, Leibnitz asserted that a finite substance can act, but only on itself, and that God, prior to creation, programmed all substances with such extraordinary wisdom and care that their states merely seem to be the result of their acting on each other causally. Insofar as each of these three alternatives might appear, at first light, to be at least as counter intuitive as Descartes’s view was problematic, the “rationalist” line of inquiry concerning causality looks to be, at least, a superfluous curiosity and, at worst, a dead end is simply distracts from the main storyline. Since the primary role played by these rationalist in the story of causality is that of critics of Descartes’s account of mind-body interaction, rather than that of figures to contribute something of lasting value to philosophy, no major harm would be done if one covers them shriftly.
Empiricist, counter the rationalist, also rose during the early modern period. For example, Berkeley, was similar to Malbranche’s, there is typically thought to being empiricist. David Hume, however delivered a truly magnificent addition to their modern causality debate. Indeed, David Hume showed that one did not need a robust metaphysical account of causality as Descartes and John Locke et al., since all that is needed or may regularity is between distinct events rather than necessary connections between substances and their states (Watkins, 2-3; note all of this heretofore comes from these pages).
END of review of Watkins book.