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Descendants of Hume's first definition still dominate the philosophy of causation: a causal succession is supposed to be a succes-sion that instantiates a regularity. To be sure, there have been improvements. Nowadays we try to distinguish the regularities that count-the" causal laws"-from mere accidental regularities of suc-cession. We subsume causes and effects under regularities by means of descriptions they satisfy, not by over-all similarity. And we allow a cause to be only one indispensable part, not the whole, of the total situation that is followed by the effect in accordance with a law. In present-day regularity analyses, a cause is defined (roughly) as any member of any minimal set of actual conditions that are jointly suf-ficient, given the laws, for the existence of the effect. More precisely, let C be the proposition that c exists (or occurs) and let E be the proposition that e exists. Then c causes e, according to a …