Abstract

This paper takes issue with a widely accepted view of mental causation. This is the view that mental causation is either reducible to physical causation or ultimately untenable, because incompatible with the causal completeness of physics The paper examines, first, why recent attempts to save the phenomena of mental causation by way of the notion of supervenient causation fail The result of t/us examination is the claim that any attempted specification of the most basic causal factors which supposedly underlie a causal transaction cannot account for the counterfactually necessary connections with the effect m question. By contrast, the specification of these factors at a higher-level would allow establishing such connections. The paper doses with a discussion of how the view of autonomous higher-level causation grounded on counterfactual relations can be made compatible with the physicalistic commitment to a complete specification of the particular causes of any physical effect exclusively in physical terms.