Mental Causation and the Metaphysics of Causation

The Metaphysics of Mental Causation

is "what is got before the mind by an act of abstraction." It is what comes to be known by attending to some part, or aspect, of "what is presented."18 In contrast, what is concrete is grasped by at tending to all of what is presented, not by attending to some part or aspect of it. No special act of selective attending is involved in our grasp of concrete things. 17 Campbell, "The Metaphysic of...

Causation and Mental Causation

How the mind of a human being can determine the bodily spirits [i.e., the fluids in the nerves, muscles, etc.] in producing voluntary actions, being only a thinking substance. For it appears that all determination of movement is produced by the pushing of the thing being moved, by the manner in which it is pushed by that which moves it, or else by the qualification and figure of the surface of ...

The Moral Metaphysics of Causation and Results

Embedded Cognition and Mental Causation: Setting Empirical Bounds on Metaphysics

In this paper, we challenge Jaegwon Kim’s version of neural reductionism according to which the causal powers of mental properties are pre-empted by those of neural properties. Using empirical and theoretical developments from the field of embedded cognition, we articulate and defend a notion of process externalism that extends Clark and Chalmers’ notion of an extended mind. We argue that proce...

Particles, causation, and the metaphysics of structure

I consider the idea of a structure of fundamental physical particles (as described, for example, in quantum theory) being causal. Causation is traditionally thought of as involving relations between entities—objects or events—that cause and are affected. On structuralist interpretations, however, it is unclear whether or how precisely fundamental particles can be causally efficacious. On some i...