BOOK REVIEWS Mathias Frisch, Causal Reasoning in Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. viii þ256 pp. In 1913 Bertrand Russell argued that contrary to what most of us presume, the causal structure of the world is not fundamental, that is, that there is no tem- porally asymmetric relation of causal determination, production, or influence built into the fundamental fabric of reality. His argument was that causal notions had been eliminated from physics in favor of time-symmetric, fundamental laws. Causation should be pushed aside as a relic, he said, of a bygone era. Cart- wright’s (1983) influential critique of Russell’s position convinced many that causal eliminativism, in the form that Russell defended it, is not supportable, because causal structure plays a functional role in practical reasoning that can- not be played by nomological relations. Causal pathways identify strategic routes to bringing about ends, and a law-like relationship between A and B does not entail that A-ing is a way of bringing B about. So, for example, bad breath is correlated with tooth decay as a matter of physical law (since both arise with the presence of bacteria in the mouth), but taking breath mints is a not a strategic route to preventing tooth decay. By making it clear that what Russell identified as the physical replace- ments could not play the functional role of causal beliefs in practical reasoning, Cartwright renewed interest in causal relations. There have been important developments in recent decades in understanding causal relations. There has been progress in understanding what causal claims add to structures like laws and probabilities. Formalisms have been developed for representing causal claims in science. Methods of causal inference and discovery have been devel- oped. But among physicists and philosophers of physics, the dominant position on the ontology of causal relations remains that—contrary to what philoso- phers and scientists took for granted for centuries—causal structure is not part of the fundamental fabric of the physical world. This is the position that Frisch calls the “anti-causalist” position. His book is intended as a counterpoint to the prevailing anticausalism. His aim is, in his own words, “to show that, contrary to what appears to be the received wisdom among philosophers of physics, causal structures play a legitimate role in physics” (21). By causal structures, Frisch means asymmetric structures represented by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that play the practical role that Cartwright ident- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 Philosophical Review, Vol. 125, No. 3, 2016 q 2016 by Cornell University 431 09/05/2016 PR125_3_04Bookreviews_1pp.pdf