Review of Joseph Halpern, Actual Causality

Halpern's Actual Causality is an extended development of an account of causal relations among individual events in the tradition that analyzes causation as difference making. The book is notable for its efforts at formal clarity, its exploration of "normality" conditions, and the wealth of examples it uses and whose provenance it traces. Unfortunately, the various normality conditions considered undermine the capacity of the basic theory to plausibly treat various cases Halpern considers, and the unalloyed basic theory yields implausible results in simple cases of overdetermination, which are not remedied by Halpern's probabilistic version of his theory or unambiguously by the variety of normality conditions Actual Causality entertains.