How chemistry provides a unique perspective on causation

It is hard to overstate the importance of chemical reactions in understanding nature and sustaining life. From lighting fires and fermenting bread, to breathing, developing life-saving drugs and creating (but also tackling) climate change, there are very few activities that are not the result of naturally occurring or anthropogenic chemical reactions.

Yet philosophers have not examined reactions as much as other aspects of chemistry. In part, this is because of the implicit assumption that understanding the chemical and quantum mechanical properties of substances suffices to explain how they react. And indeed, this is sensible: the way reactants interact with each other is determined by the properties of their constituting elements.

Nevertheless, examining reactions prompts discussions around one of the most intriguing issues in philosophy: that of causation. Formally, causation refers to a spatiotemporal relation between a pair of events, entities or facts such that the first event presumably leads to the occurrence of the second event. One of the primary questions this raises is whether everything in the world has a cause for its occurrence. In this context, Plato claimed that ‘everything that becomes or changes must do so owing to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause’.