Epiphenomenalism: Dead End or Way Out?

Many philosophers take it for granted that epiphenomenalism is obviously a dead end for an understanding of the human mind and its relation to the physical world and nothing but a counterintuitive theory of last resort. Others, by contrast, think that epiphenomenalism might be the way out of some of the severest problems discussed in the philosophy of mind during the past decades. Traditionally, epiphenomenalism amounts to the claim that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain although mental events themselves do not cause anything. Mental events may seem to affect the causal course of the physical world, for instance by bringing about behavioural effects, but, in fact, the psychobehavioural sequences we observe in our everyday experience of ourselves are only due to the causal processes at the underlying physical or neurophysiological level. As a label for a philosophical theory of the mind, the term ‘epiphenomenalism’ (an ‘epiphenomenon’ being something like a ‘secondary symptom’) was coined by William James (see James, 1879) in his criticism of the position of the British biologist, physiologist, and philosopher Thomas Henry Huxley whose Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science from 1874 — aptly entitled ‘On the Hypothesis that Animals are