Embedded Cognition and Mental Causation: Setting Empirical Bounds on Metaphysics

A Ghazalian Predicament Epistemology and Metaphysics of Causation in the Works of Ghazali

The Relation between Conception and Causation in Spinoza’s Metaphysics

If you asked a contemporary metaphysician to list her foundational, unanalyzed notions, she might say: possibility, object and part. Or perhaps: grounding, bundle and point. If you asked Spinoza, conception and causation would be at the top of his list. He uses these notions to state many of his most important doctrines, including necessitarianism and substance monism, as well as to define seve...

Empirical Analyses of Causation

Conceptual analyses can be subdivided into two classes, good and evil. Empirical analysis is the good kind, routinely practiced in the sciences. Orthodox analysis is the malevolent version that plagues philosophical discourse. In this paper, I will clarify the difference between them, provide some reasons to prefer good over evil, and illustrate their consequences for the metaphysics of causati...

Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics

Philosophy of science has a complicated – almost schizophrenic – relationship with metaphysics. Studying topics such as the nature of causation, laws of nature, and spacetime, it clearly engages in activities that deserve to be classified as metaphysics. Yet the academic discipline itself was born in opposition to the field. Carnap, Reichenbach, Feigl, Neurath, and Popper, for example, were uni...

Functionalism and the Metaphysics of Causal Exclusion

Take functionalism to be the thesis that mental property M is the property of having some other property that plays a certain characteristic causal role R.1 Functionalists are usually physicalists, and so take mental properties to be physically realized, such that for any mental property M, there’s a physical property P that fills R. Causal exclusion looms. Functionalism takes mental properties...