A.N. Whitehead delivered his Gifford Lectures during the 1927, 1928 session. He argued that causality is a basic concept requiring a leap of intuition to grasp rather than pure logic.
Aristotle categorized material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause as the four types of answers to why questions. Thomas Aquinas later posed a hierarchy prioritizing these causes with final greater than efficient greater than material greater than formal.
Causal efficacy cannot propagate faster than light according to Albert Einstein's collected papers from 1987, 2005. This constraint prevents reference coordinate systems where an observer would see an effect precede its cause.
Judea Pearl published his book Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference in 2000 through Cambridge University Press. His do-calculus permits one to infer interventional probabilities from conditional probabilities in causal Bayesian networks.
The combination of poor harvests, peasant hardships, high taxes, lack of representation, and kingly ineptitude are among causes of the French Revolution. These factors represent efficient causes approximating Aristotelian terminology in historical discussions.