Emma asked:

Does Monday cause Tuesday?

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Well first of all you can see that the names of the days can be anything or nothing, so they are
irrelevant. Second, we humans divide out time by periods of light and dark and label those periods.
We don't have to do that; we could just count the time from, say, full moon to full moon in tenths or
hundredths of that time, if we wanted to.

Third, what causes the periods of light and dark we call "day" and "night"? The fact that the source of
light for the earth is the sun, basically shining like a spotlight on the earth, while the earth rotates on
its axis (and it also revolves around the sun, but that's irrelevant to this). Ok? What causes the sun to
burn? Hydrogen fusion reactions, basically... the sun is an enormous H-bomb which doesn't explode
outward because its own gravity keeps it in one place. What causes the earth to rotate? Angular
momentum resulting from its formation from a cloud of rotating particles; in other words, it got going a
couple of billion years ago and nothing has hit it hard enough to stop it; it just goes on momentum,
like a gyroscope. Ok so far? Now then, you tell me... what causes the day to progress to night?
Nothing, really, just the system sitting there, burning and turning. Does Monday cause Tuesday?
That's like asking whether the shadow on a turning ball causes the light next to it, right?

Steven Ravett Brown

If you take a Humean view of causation (David Hume Treatise Of Human Nature), then the the
statement, 'x causes y' is analysed along the following lines:

"At all places and at all times, events of type X are followed by events of type Y, and x is an event of
type X, and y is an event of type Y."

A whole philosophical industry has grown up trying to patch the holes in this deceptively simple
analysis. An obvious objection is the one that you have raised. Tuesday alwaysfollows Monday.
Does that mean, as Hume's analysis implies, that Monday causesTuesday? (Of course, names are
arbitrary, but one could just as easily have asked, 'Does today cause tomorrow?', or, more generally,
'Does the time period t to t+1 cause the time period t+1 to t+2?')

However, it can be argued that in a senseit is true that Monday causes Tuesday (or today causes
tomorrow), because — at least, if you accept determinism — everything that happens tomorrow is
caused by everything that happens today, if by 'everything' we mean the sum total of events occurring
in a given time period. But it is a strange way of talking, and not at all what we normally mean when
we say that one thing causes something else.

However, if you are a Humean about causation, and you believe in determinism, then, yes, Monday
does cause Tuesday.

Geoffrey Klempner