Online research in philosophy

Worries about mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how a mental substance (thought to be immaterial) could interact with a material substance, a body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate immaterial minds, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior? How could something mental qua mental cause what it does? After looking at the traditional Problem of Interaction, we survey various versions of the property-based problem and look at proposed solutions to them.

This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind...

One may gather from the arguments of two of the last papers published before his death that J. L. Mackie held the following three theses concerning the mind/body problem : (1) There is a distinct realm of mental properties, so a dualism of properties at least is true and materialism false.

Jaegwon Kim is one of the most preeminent and most influential contributors to the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This collection of essays presents the core of his work on supervenience and mind with two sets of postscripts especially written for the book. The essays focus on such issues as the nature of causation and events, what dependency relations other than causal relations connect facts and events, the analysis of supervenience, and the mind-body problem. A central problem in the philosophy of mind is the problem of explaining how the mind can causally influence bodily processes. Professor Kim explores this problem in detail, criticizes the nonreductionist solution of it, and offers a modified reductionist solution of his own. Both professional philosophers and their graduate students will find this an invaluable collection.

The Cartesian distinction between res extensa and res cogitans initiated in the early modern age the philosophical discourse with regard to an adequate explanation of the nexus between the body and the mind. The causal closure of the body (as essentially a physical phenomenon) seems to exclude both the physical and neuronal causation of mental states and operations as well as the mental causation of bodily states and processes. The following treatise is an attempt to re-examine the causal connectivity between the body and the mind and thereby to explain the mysterious interaction between these two entirely distinct modes of existence and reality. The neuronal causation of the mental existence of human beings, and conversely the mental causation of bodily volition seem to surpass the framework of ordinary causal processes which are primarily conceived as temporal sequences of causes and effects in natural phenomena. The existence of the conscious subject – as res cogitans – can hardly be reduced to momentary neuronal processes of causation; it implies a constant ontological causation in which the elementary physical and material modes of being cause constantly and ontologically the mental states and operations – which eventually form higher and unitary modes of being. This dual nature of a neuronal-ontological causation, namely the constant and existential causation of the mind and the momentary causation of mental processes (sensation, perception, cognition, thinking, etc.), seems to resolve the problem of the causal connectivity between the body and the mind. However, the ontological causation cannot be restricted to the causal interaction between the body and the mind; it can be extended to the modes of existence of the overall physical i. e. material reality.