Abstract

Non-reductive accounts of the mind appear to run into difficulties when it comes to accommodating our common sense intuitions about the nature of mental causation. Using Donald Davidson's response to his critics' charge of epiphenomenalism as my starting point, I argue that many non-reductive positions are still grounded on residual naturalistic presuppositions, and that our recognizing that such presuppositions are in fact groundless constitutes a first step towards the development of a sustainable non-reductive account of mental causation. I then make efforts to draw connections between this issue and recent work in perception by 'natural realists' such as John McDowell and Hilary Putnam, arguing that in both cases it is a particular conception of what it is to be natural which is the source of our philosophical puzzlement about the mind.