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Newton's third law, causality, contemporaneity and Hume

Newton's third law (that every action has an equal and opposite reaction), seems to me to describe two aspects of the same whole, for the action and reaction occur during at the same time. Our ability to note how two things are contemporaneously interrelated via this third law totally belies Hume's crude conception of antecedent/consequent events as the only knowledge we can have of causality. (On the other hand, a Humean can object that this law is an example of superimposing a mathematical conception of objects [which involves a kind of simultaneity] onto the data of experience.)

If they are simultaneous, however, then why do we call one the "action" and the other the "reaction"? Such language misleads us into imagining that one occurs before the other. The answer might be that in our experience, one of the two things exerting equal and opposite forces usually seems to initiate the process: e.g., when I run on a track, I initiate this process, even though the earth exerts an equal and opposite force equal to the force I exercise upon the earth. This initiative is quite real; nevertheless is is unrecognized by one who merely notes the equivalence of opposed forces.

In spite of the Hume-friendly language used by Newton, the case of a contemporaneous action/reaction is more similar to Aristotle's per se cause than it is to Hume's antecedent and consequent. For the per se cause...
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Leo White said…
I think that the point of this post is that this Newtonian understanding of causality has something in common with an Aristotelian psychology/epistemology of causality rather than with a Humean one. The action and reaction described by Newton, inasmuch as they are simultaneous, are not like the before and after that Hume says is the source of our knowledge of causality. Rather, Newton's claim is intelligible to us in virtue of sense of how our own interactions with things in our environment involves a simultaneous awareness of both how we push and of how things kinda push back at the VERY SAME MOMENT.

No room for holistic and simultaneous awareness of such interaction in Hume.
8:15 PM
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