  One of the central themes of early modern philosophy is the reconceptualization of causation. Scholastic philosophy largely understood causation on an Aristotelian model, on which all change was to be explained by a constellation of four causes: final, formal, material and efficient causes. Early modern thinking about causation began with a rejection of final and formal causes. Determining final causes involved a speculation that outstripped human understanding, while formal causes were dismissed as occult qualities, simple assertions that things worked without an intelligible explanation of how they did so. Several canonical figures in early modern philosophy – Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume and Kant – are often situated with respect to one another through their views on causation. In recent years, Malebranche, with his account of occasionalist causation, (a view on which neither bodies nor minds have causal power in themselves, and God is the only efficient cause), has been worked into the story. What Malebranche highlights is that understanding the nature of causation was a live philosophical problem: while there was agreement about dismissing final and formal causation, there was much disagreement about what should replace it, and in particular about the nature of efficient causation. Some early modern women thinkers were very much involved in this debate, and they are just as easily incorporated into the philosophical story as Malebranche. For instance, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, in her 1643 correspondence with him, questions Descartes about the nature of causation between mind and body. She can be read as insisting that an adequate account of causation must be applicable in all causal contexts. Margaret Cavendish, in her Observations on the Experimental Philosophy, develops a vitalist account of causation wherein motion is not transferred from one body to another, but rather one body comes to be in motion through a self-patterning in harmony with another body around it. (The SEP entry on Margaret Cavendish provides a more detailed summary of Cavendish's account of causation, along with guidance for further reading.) While Cavendish's account of causation did not carry the day, vitalism of one form or another was a dominant strand of thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is worth noting that vitalism is also a position within contemporary philosophy of biology.