If this crash course is intended for a general readership, I suggest it would be catch readers’ interest most effectively if each section began by setting out a real practical problem or controversy taken from science or law concerning finding the cause of something, or attributing legal culpability, or finding an explanation for a phenomenon, or finding the reasons for a correlation, or predicting events or controlling events or constructing an argument. The problem-based approach would immediately focus the reader’s attention on the reasons why he needs to know about causality, and what things he needs to know about it. The didactic bits could come out in the process of struggling with the practical problems.

Back in 2009, I did a grad seminar on causation with the following readings. Here are the readings I used, with the caveat that I might do it differently today:

Dependence causes: Ronald Giere, “Causal Systems and Statistical Hypotheses” and David Lewis, “Causation as Influence”
Dependence causes: Jim Woodward, “Causation with a Human Face” and Kenneth Reisman & Patrick Forber, “Manipulation and the Causes of Evolution”
Production causes: Wesley Salmon, “Causality without Counterfactuals” and Phil Dowe, “Causality and Conserved Quantities: A Reply to Salmon”
Production causes: Stuart Glennan, “Mechanisms and the Nature of Causation” and Peter Machamer, Lindley Darden, & Carl Craver, “Thinking about Mechanisms”
Probabilistic causation: Elliott Sober, “Two Concepts of Cause” and Christopher R Hitchcock, “A Generalized Probabilistic Theory of Causal Relevance”
Probabilistic causation: Peter Menzies, “Probabilistic Causation and the Pre-emption Problem” and Ellery Eells, “Propensity, Preemption, and the Identity of Events”
Applications: M Parascandola and DL Weed, “Causation in Epidemiology” and Daniel Steel, “Social Mechanisms and Causal Inference”
Pluralism: Ned Hall, “Two Concepts of Causation” and Nancy Cartwright, “Causation: One Word, Many Things”
Anti-pluralism: Stathis Psillos, “A Glimpse of the Secret Connexion: Harmonizing Mechanisms with Counterfactuals” and John Gerring, “Causation: A Unified Framework for the Social Sciences”

I don’t think an adequate crash course on causation can be done. But here are some thoughts. The following should be supplemented by reading the Oxford Handbook.

On Hume:
Robinson (1962) “Hume’s Two Definitions of ‘Cause'” Phil Quarterly 12, 162-171.
Beebee (2007) “Hume on Causation,” Chapter 9 in Price and Corry (eds) Causation, Physics, and the Constitution of Reality.

On Regularity Theories:
Davidson (1967) “Causal Relations” J Phil 64(21), 691-703.
Baumgartner (2008) “Regularity Theories Reassessed” Philosophia 36, 327-354.

On Probabilistic Theories:
Salmon (1980) “Probabilistic Causality,” Pacific Phil Quarterly 61, 50-74.
[[Lots of other stuff, but in my opinion, reductive probabilistic approaches are dead, having been superseded by non-reductive approaches in the graphical modeling tradition.]]

On Counterfactual Theories:
Lewis (1973) “Causation,” J Phil 70, 556-567.
Lewis (2000) “Causation as Influence,” J Phil 94(4), 182-197.
Beebee (2006) “Does anything hold the universe together?” Synthese 149, 509-533.

On Agency and Interventionist Theories:
Ducasse (1926) “On the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation,” J Phil 23, 57-68.
Cartwright (1979) “Causal laws and effective strategies,” Nous 13, 419-437.
Hausman (1986) “Causation and experimentation,” Am Phil Quarterly 23, 143-154.
Price (1991) “Agency and Probabilistic Causality,” BJPS 42, 157-176.
Meek and Glymour (1994) “Conditioning and Intervening,” BJPS 45, 1001-1021.

On Process and Mechanism Theories:
Salmon (1994) “Causality without counterfactuals,” Phil Sci 61, 297-312.
Machamer et al. (2000) “Thinking about mechanisms,” Phil Sci 67, 1-25.
Woodward (2002) “What is a mechanism?” Phil Sci 69, S366-S377.
Psillos (2004) “A glimpse of the secret connection,” Perspectives on Science 12, 288-319.
[[A bunch of stuff by Dowe … hard to choose.]]

On Causal Powers and Capacities:
Harre (1970) “Powers,” BJPS 21, 81-101.
Lewis (1997) “Finkish Dispositions,” Phil Quarterly 47, 143-158.
Hiddleston (2005) “Causal Powers,” BJPS 56, 27-59.

On Anti-Reductionism, Pluralism, and Skepticism:
Anscombe (1971) “Causality and Determination,” in Sosa and Tooley (eds) Causation.
Tooley (1990) “Causation: Reduction versus Realism,” PPR 50, 215-236.
Hitchcock (2003) “Of Humean Bondage,” BJPS 54, 1-25.
Cartwright (2004) “One Word, Many Things,” Phil Sci 71, 805-819.
Russell (1912) “On the Notion of Cause,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 13, 1-26.
Skyrms (1984) “EPR: Lessons for Metaphysics,” Midwest Studies 9, 245-255.
Norton (2003) “Causation as Folk Science,” Phil Imprint 3. [Reprinted as Chapter 2 of Price and Corry]
Hitchcock (2007) “What Russell Got Right,” Chapter 3 in Price and Corry.

On Causal Modeling and Statistics:
Holland (1986) “Statistics and Causal Inference,” J of the Am Stat Assoc 81, 945-960.
Freedman (1991) “Statistical Models and Shoe Leather,” Sociological Methodology 21, 291-313.
Pearl and Verma (1991) “A Theory of Inferred Causation” [[available online]]
Pearl (1995) “Causal Diagrams for Empirical Research,” Biometrika 82, 669-688.
Dawid (2000) “Causal Inference without Counterfactuals,” J of Am Stat Assoc 95, 407-424.
Pearl (2001) “Bayesianism and Causality,” in Foundations of Bayesianism
Scheines (2002) “Computation and Causation,” Metaphilosophy 33, 158-180.
Spirtes (2010) “Introduction to Causal Inference,” J of Machine Learning Research 11, 1643-1662.
Greenland (2011) “The Logic and Philosophy of Causal Inference,” Chapter 25 in Bandyopadhyay and Forster (eds) Philosophy of Statistics
[[Lots and lots of great, even more technical stuff by Glymour, Spirtes, Scheines, Eberhardt, Richardson, Zhang, and others. Too much to list, really.]]

On Actual Causation:
Halpern and Pearl (2005) “Causes and Explanations: A Structural-Model Approach, Parts 1 and 2,” BJPS 56, 843-887 and 889-911.
Hitchcock (2007) “Prevention, Preemption, and the Principle of Sufficient Reason,” Phil Review 116, 495-532.
Hall (2007) “Structural Equations and Causation,” Phil Studies 132, 109-136.
Halpern (2008) “Defaults and Normality in Causal Structures,” Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.
Hitchcock and Knobe (2009) “Cause and Norm,” J Phil 61, 587-612.
Glymour et al. (2010) “Actual Causation: A Stone Soup Essay,” Synthese 175, 169-192.
Halpern and Hitchcock (2014) “Graded Causation and Defaults” BJPS axt.
Blanchard and Schaffer (forthcoming?) “Cause without Default”
Halpern (2014?) “Appropriate Causal Models and the Stability of Causation”

On Causation and Responsibility:
Moore (1999) “Causation and Responsibility,” Social Philosophy and Policy 16, 1-51.
Sartorio (2004) “How to be responsible for something without causing it,” Phil Perspectives 18, 315-336.
Chockler and Halpern (2004) “Responsibility and Blame,” J of Artificial Intelligence Research 22, 93-115.
Sartorio (2007) “Causation and Responsibility,” Phil Compass 2/5, 749-765.
[[There is so much more here, with tons of overlap with the second section on psychology, it’s just not at all clear how to start.]]

On Causation and Psychology (Learning):
Scholl and Tremoulet (2000) “Perceptual Causality and Animacy,” Trends in Cog Sci 4, 299-309.
Gopnik et al. (2004) “A Theory of Causal Learning in Children,” Psych Review 111, 3-32.
Penn and Povinelli (2007) “Causal Cognition in Humans and Nonhuman Animals,” Annual Review of Psych 58, 97-118.

On Causation and Psychology (Attribution):
Livengood and Rose (forthcoming) “Experimental Philosophy and Causal Attribution” in Sytsma and Buckwalter (eds) Companion to Experimental Philosophy
Kelley (1973) “The Processes of Causal Attribution,” Am Psychologist 28, 107.
Einhorn and Hogarth (1986) “Judging Probable Cause,” Psych Bulletin 99, 3-19.
Hilton and Slugoski (1986) “Knowledge-Based Causal Attribution,” Psych Review 93, 75-88.
Alicke (1992) “Culpable Causation,” J of Personality and Soc Psych 63, 368-378.
Ahn et al. (1995) “The Role of Covariation Versus Mechanism Information in Causal Attribution,” Cognition 54, 299-352.
Gerstenberg and Lagnado (2010) “Spreading the Blame,” Cognition 115, 166-171.
Danks et al. (2014) “Demoralizing Causation,” Phil Studies 171, 251-277.

On Meta-Theory for Causation:
Glymour (2004) “Review of Woodward,” BJPS 55, 779-790.
Hall (2004) “Rescued from the Rubbish Bin,” Phil Sci 71, 1107-1114.
Menzies chapter (“Platitudes and Counterexamples”) from Oxford Handbook
Paul (2010) “A New Role for Experimental Work in Metaphysics,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1, 461-476.
Paul (2012) “Metaphysics as Modeling,” Phil Studies 160, 1-29.
Chapters 1 and 2 from Hall and Paul (2013) Causation: A User’s Guide

This list leaves out SO MUCH. I feel embarrassed offering it at all. Lots of stuff on causation and explanation, on causation by absence, omission, and disconnection, on backwards causation, on the causal Markov condition (and related assumptions for causal inference), and on and on and on. This is part of why I think a crash course on “causation” without further qualification just can’t be done.

Grad Sockpuppet,

I’m sorry that you’re exasperated, but I don’t think your suggested list would work. If an instructor used just those six readings, the result would be a very, very odd view of causation research. You seem to have constructed your list by taking one reading from each of the first six sub-headings in my long list. How do you propose to get students from those to readings falling under the other eight sub-headings? Or more particularly, how do you do that without just reproducing the long list (or something similar)?

My point in offering my list was to support the claim that a crash course that is both doable in a week and also suggests even the basic geography of the topic is impossible for causation. It should not be surprising, therefore, that I didn’t abide by the rules for describing a crash course for causation.

I think it might be possible to give a crash course for some sub-topic in causation. You might read my list as giving the beginnings of 14 separate crash courses. (Guiding questions would have to be added, and in some cases, choices would have to be made to narrow even the sub-lists. And I already felt like I had done a TON of pruning to get those sub-lists to be as short as they are.) But there just isn’t going to be a workable crash course on causation as a whole. Any six readings that anyone might name will fail to even hint at most of the *kinds* of literature, or even mention most of the interesting literature in bibliographies. The result of trying to do a crash course on a too-large topic will be to distort what the literature looks like and/or to give a very biased view of what is important or interesting. I suspect that the large list I gave is itself massively idiosyncratic and leaves out important literature. (There are no pieces by Yablo or Schaffer; there are no pieces on specific problems like mental causation; there are no pieces on more abstract questions of causal metaphysics, like what sorts of things could be the relata of a causal relation; and there are almost certainly other things left off the list because I haven’t even considered them.)