This book demonstrates the importance of ontology for a central debate in philosophy of mind. Mental causation seems an obvious aspect of the world. But it is hard to understand how it can happen unless we get clear about what the entities involved in the process are. An international team of contributors presents new work on this problem.
Physicalism—the thesis that everything there is in the world, including our minds, is constituted by basic physical entities—has dominated the philosophy of mind during the last few decades. But although the conceptual foundations of the physicalist agenda—including a proper explication of notions such as ‘causation', ‘determination', ‘realization’ or even ‘physicalism’ itself—must be settled before more specific problems (e.g. the problems of mental causation and human agency) can be satisfactorily addressed, a comprehensive philosophical reflection on the relationships between the various key concepts of the debate on physicalism is yet missing. This book presents a range of essays on the conceptual foundations of physicalism, mental causation and human agency, written by established and leading authors in the field.
We use concepts of causal powers and their relatives-dispositions, capacities, and abilities-to describe the world around us, both in everyday life and in scientific practice. This volume presents new work on the nature of causal powers, and their connections with other phenomena within metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind.
The ontological debate on the nature of properties is alive as ever. Mainly, they are viewed either as universals or tropes (abstract particulars), an alternative with an immediate impact on what events are taken to be. Although much inquiry in philosophy of mind is done without a full awareness of it, some recent works suggest that the choice may have far-reaching consequences on central topics of this discipline, e.g., token physicalism, multiple realizability, mental causation, perception, introspection, self-awareness. This book explores the extent to which this is true with novel contributions by philosophers who have played a major role in bringing to the fore this interplay of foundational metaphysics and philosophical psychology and by other experts in these fields.
Downward causation plays a fundamental role in many theories of metaphysics and philosophy of mind. It is strictly connected with many topics in philosophy, including but not limited to: emergence, mental causation, the nature of causation, the nature of causal powers and dispositions, laws of nature, and the possibility of ontological and epistemic reductions. Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Downward Causation brings together experts from different fields—including William Bechtel, Stewart Clark and Tom Lancaster, Carl Gillett, John Heil, Robin F. Hendry, Max Kistler, Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum —who delve into classic and unexplored lines of philosophical inquiry related to downward causation. It critically assesses the possibility of downward causation given different ontological assumptions and explores the connection between downward causation and the metaphysics of causation and dispositions. Finally, it presents different cases of downward causation in empirical fields such as physics, chemistry, biology and the neurosciences. This volume is both a useful introduction and a collection of original contributions on this fascinating and hotly debated philosophical topic.
This book aims to show the centrality of a proper ontology of properties in thinking about consciousness. Philosophers have long grappled with what is now known as the hard problem of consciousness, i.e., how can subjective or qualitative features of our experience—such as how a strawberry tastes—arise from brain states? More recently, philosophers have incorporated what seems like promising empirical research from neuroscience and cognitive psychology in an attempt to bridge the gap between measurable mental states on the one hand, and phenomenal qualities on the other. In Consciousness and the Ontology of Properties, many of the leading philosophers working on this issue, as well as a few emerging scholars, have written 14 new essays on this problem. The essays address topics as diverse as substance dualism, mental causation, the metaphysics of artificial intelligence, the logic of conceivability, constitution, extended minds, the emergence of consciousness, and neuroscience and the unity and neural correlates of consciousness, but are nonetheless unified in a collective objective: the need for a proper ontology of properties to understand the hard problem of consciousness, both on non-empirical and empirical grounds.
We explain what people think and do by citing their reasons, but how do such explanations work, and what do they tell us about the nature of reality? Contemporary efforts to address these questions are often motivated by the worry that our ordinary conception of rationality contains a kernel of supernaturalism-a ghostly presence that meditates on sensory messages and orchestrates behavior on the basis of its ethereal calculations. In shunning this otherworldly conception, contemporary philosophers have focused on the project of "naturalizing" the mind, viewing it as a kind of machine that converts sensory input and bodily impulse into thought and action. Eric Marcus rejects this choice between physicalism and supernaturalism as false and defends a third way. He argues that philosophers have failed to take seriously the idea that rational explanations postulate a distinctive sort of causation-rational causation. Rational explanations do not reveal the same sorts of causal connections that explanations in the natural sciences do. Rather, rational causation draws on the theoretical and practical inferential abilities of human beings. Marcus defends this position against a wide array of physicalist arguments that have captivated philosophers of mind for decades. Along the way he provides novel views on, for example, the difference between rational and nonrational animals and the distinction between states and events.
This book is a systematic analysis of John R. Searle’s philosophy of mind. Searle’s view of mind, as a set of subjective and biologically embodied processes, can account for our being part of nature qua mindful beings. This model finds support in neuroscience and offers reliable solutions to the problems of consciousness, mental causation, and the self.
Causation is a central topic in many areas of philosophy. In metaphysics, philosophers want to know what causation is, and how it is related to laws of nature, probability, action, and freedom of the will. In epistemology, philosophers investigate how causal claims can be inferred from statistical data, and how causation is related to perception, knowledge and explanation. In the philosophy of mind, philosophers want to know whether and how the mind can be said to have causal efficacy, and in ethics, whether there is a moral distinction between acts and omissions and whether the moral value of an act can be judged according to its consequences. And causation is a contested concept in other fields of enquiry, such as biology, physics, and the law. This book provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of these and other topics, as well as the history of the causation debate from the ancient Greeks to the logical empiricists. The chapters provide surveys of contemporary debates, while often also advancing novel and controversial claims; and each includes a comprehensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The book is thus the most comprehensive source of information about causation currently available, and will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates through to professional philosophers.
Metaphysics and ontology feature among the traditional and fundamental concerns of philosophers. Gaining a picture of the world and the kind of objects that exist out there is for most philosophers (past and present) a preliminary aim upon which other theoretical activities depend. In fact, it seems that sound conclusions on topics relevant to ethics, aesthetics, psychology, and common and scientific knowledge can be achieved only after one has been given a picture of that sort. What is worth stressing, though, is that from time to time the tribunal of history has managed to put its finger on some flawed conclusions. To take a time-worn example, who would now accept Plato’s claim that the spatiotemporal world is just an imperfect copy of a world of abstract objects conceived of as perfect unchanging models of concrete things? The picture Plato gave us is nothing but a myth – an account which is too far away from what common sense and science could accept, too detached from the usual ways of conducting a rational discussion. Therefore, pictures of this kind appear to be supported by nothing but dogmas, i.e. uncompromising principles taken as true without any previous critical analysis. And Plato has no shortage of company. Issues of this kind revolving around metaphysics and ontology are tackled in the essays in this volume, which approach a secular debate in fresh and original ways, providing the necessary tools for clearing the field of unpalatable metaphysical and ontological items.
