Causal reasoning is one of the most popular forms of common-sense reasoning, which has been widely studied both from theoretical and application points of view. Many attempts have been made to develop models and formalisms able to capture the essential features of this form of reasoning. These include, among others, different types of causal networks, the debate about causality in qualitative physics, and theories of causation. However, no one of these attempts seems to have received an incontestable consensus. Among the many open problems in the field of causal reasoning, we focus in this paper on some fundamental issues which concern:- the epistemological analysis of knowledge underlying the concept of causality;- the study of the indissoluble relation between causality and uncertainty;- the characterization of the general processes underlying the intuitive concept of reasoning about causes and effects, and the investigation of the relationships existing between knowledge representation and reasoning, often obscured by the use of ambiguous terms such as "causal knowledge" and "causal reasoning".
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