Abstract

I walk toward the water fountain because I want to get a drink of water . Common sense, and a distinguished philosophical tradition, understand the want and belief here as causing my walking. This presumption, however, is challenged by the physical antecedents of our bodily motions. If we believe that our bodily motions have sufficient physical causes, then , no distinct mental event causes any of our bodily motions; mental events are epiphenomenal. ;A popular resolution identifies particular mental events with physical ones, thereby, forestalling any threat of causal competition. However, a new threat of exclusion emerges when we attend to the mental features of events. Many have argued that even if mental events cause bodily motions, the mental properties of those events are rendered causally irrelevant by the physical properties whose instantiations are sufficient for bodily motions. ;I show that previous philosophers have failed to articulate adequately a concept of causal relevance. I define two broad approaches to causal relevance, one analyzing causal relevance in terms of sufficiency, the other, necessity. Focusing on the latter, I offer two precise concepts of causal relevance. I show that on the first, although mental properties are causally relevant, the notion of relevance is too weak. On the second, I maintain that any attempt to secure causal relevance for mental properties by distinguishing between actions and bodily motions is doomed to fail. In the course of this discussion, I contend that a widely held resolution of the exclusion problem, one that exploits strong supervenience, fails. ;In my concluding chapter, I explain and defend of kind of reduction of mental to physical properties that is compatible with multiple realizability and the lack of strict psychophysical laws. Furthermore, I argue that one can adopt this form of reductionism independently of an adherence to functionalism. Finally, I show that a denial of functionalism leaves such a reductionist in a much better position to accommodate the qualitative aspects of mental states in a broadly physical worldview