Every event can be described in different ways that can endlessly shift the cause: A person dies because their heart stopped beating, because it had insuficient blood supply, because blood was hemmorraging into the abdomen, because blood evessels burst in the abdomen, because pressure in the abdomen increased massively, because a wheel of a bus compressed the abdomen, because the bus driver failed to stop, because.....

He who wishes to explain Generation must take for his theme the organic body and its constituent parts, and philosophize about them; he must show how these parts originated, and how they came to be in that relation in which they stand to each other. But he who learns to know a thing not only from its phenomena, but also its reasons and causes; and who, therefore, not by the phenomena merely, but by these also, is compelled to say: 'The thing must be so, and it cannot be otherwise; it is necessarily of such a character; it must have such qualities; it is impossible for it to possess others'—understands the thing not only historically but truly philosophically, and he has a philosophic knowledge of it. Our own Theory of Generation is to be such a philosphic comprehension of an organic body, a very different one from one merely historical. (1764)

it is always dangerous to treat simultaneity as causation

The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.

Philosophy is a study that lets us be unhappy more intelligently.

Most of you will have heard the maxim "correlation does not imply causation." Just because two variables have a statistical relationship with each other does not mean that one is responsible for the other. For instance, ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don't light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Haagan-Dazs.