Okay, thanks (I just happened to see philosophical discussions on the subject, and I was also wondering, like you, because I thought it was a matter of definition, but I’ll read about it).
And one more thing: the Rabbi wrote in The Science of Freedom that “Hume’s empiricist outlook led him to the conclusion that this (= causality) is only a temporal and logical relation.”
That’s a little unclear to me. Hume identifies three elements in the concept of cause: 1. priority in time. 2. contiguity in space. 3. a necessary connection between them (between cause and effect).
Items 1 and 2 involve experience (correlations), but regarding 3, which is the logical component, Hume has trouble finding an explanation. He writes:

“After I have discovered or supposed that the two relations of contiguity and succession are essential to causes and effects, I find I am stopped short, and can proceed no farther in considering any single instance of cause and effect. All I can find is that one body approaches another, and that the motion of it precedes that of the other, without any sensible interval.” (Treatise 1.3.2.)

The component the Rabbi calls logical, or describes logically, is a connection that Hume calls a “necessary connection,” but in a sense that is *not logical* and cannot be described logically — because it is supposed to be a relation of dependence between empirical objects (not a “relation of ideas”). If this connection could be described logically, the problem would disappear.

So if I understood the Rabbi correctly, according to Hume there is no physical connection, because he does not even list that as one of the components of the causal relation. But as for the logical component, seemingly that is Hume’s third item, and he casts doubt on it — so it is not clear to me on what basis one says that Hume accepts this component.

I’d be happy to know whether I understood the Rabbi correctly also regarding the physical component (that is, that Hume denies it because he did not list it as one of the components, whereas he did list the logical one in item 3 and casts doubt on it…)

Thanks!

You understood excellently. Indeed, Hume ignores the question of causation itself. So of course the logical connection is also doubtful for him. This is basically the problem of induction. Who says that if there was a connection between the events, it will also be so in the future?
But if you look at two specific events, a kick and a ball flying off, you can say that there is a temporal connection between them (one after the other) and a logical one (if the one, then the other). The generalization to every kick and every ball (that kicks are causes of balls flying) is problematic because of the problem of induction. Therefore, when he speaks about logic in his context, it is connected more to the question of induction than to causality. Causality in its pure form speaks about a specific case, not a general law. And here there is logic and time, but not causation.

I don’t really understand the end of the Rabbi’s remarks. How can one speak about logic only in the context of induction and not in the context of causality? Seemingly they depend on each other. In what sense is there a logical component if we are speaking about a specific case and not a general one? If he is not generalizing, then in what sense can one say that kicking a ball is a sufficient condition for the ball to fly? (Because the logical meaning of that statement is general.)
I didn’t really understand you…
Thanks—

Even with a pair of specific events, you can speak of event A as causing B, or being B’s cause, or being a logical condition for B. The generalization to all events of the same type is an additional step and is not logically necessary. For example, if our world were not governed by fixed laws of nature (if every even hour kicking a ball would send it flying, and so on), then the causal relation would be singular.
I do not know what exactly Hume meant, but it is clear that one can speak this way even with respect to a specific case.