David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
Learn more about PhilPapers
Erkenntnis 65 (1):5-23 (2006)
Non-Cartesian substance dualism (NCSD) maintains that persons or selves are distinct from their organic physical bodies and any parts of those bodies. It regards persons as ‘substances’ in their own right, but does not maintain that persons are necessarily separable from their bodies, in the sense of being capable of disembodied existence. In this paper, it is urged that NCSD is better equipped than either Cartesian dualism or standard forms of physicalism to explain the possibility of mental causation. A model of mental causation adopting the NCSD perspective is proposed which, it is argued, is consistent with all that is currently known about the operations of the human central nervous system, including the brain. Physicalism, by contrast, seems ill-equipped to explain the distinctively intentional or teleological character of mental causation, because it effectively reduces all such causation to ‘blind’ physical causation at a neurological level.
|Keywords||Cartesianism Causation Dualism Mental Causation Metaphysics Person Self|
|Categories||categorize this paper)|
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server
Configure custom proxy (use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy)
|Through your library|
References found in this work BETA
David Hume (1739/2000). A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford University Press.
E. J. Lowe (2000). An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge University Press.
E. J. Lowe (2002). A Survey of Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.
E. J. Lowe (2000). Causal Closure Principles and Emergentism. Philosophy 75 (294):571-586.
Citations of this work BETA
Susan Schneider (2013). Non-Reductive Physicalism and the Mind Problem 1. Noûs 47 (1):135-153.
Susan Schneider (2012). Why Property Dualists Must Reject Substance Physicalism. Philosophical Studies 157 (1):61-76.
Similar books and articles
Peter Alward, Comments on Noa Lathamâ€™s Â€œIs There a Conception of Causation That Gives Rise to a Problem of Mental Causation?Â€.
Richard Montgomery (1995). Non-Cartesian Explanations Meet the Problem of Mental Causation. Southern Journal of Philosophy 33 (2):221-41.
Lynne Rudder Baker (1993). Metaphysics and Mental Causation. In John Heil & Alfred R. Mele (eds.), Mental Causation. Oxford University Press. 75-96.
David Robb & John Heil, Mental Causation. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Jaegwon Kim (1997). Does the Problem of Mental Causation Generalize? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 97 (3):281-97.
Jaegwon Kim (1992). The Nonreductivist's Trouble with Mental Causation. In John Heil & Alfred R. Mele (eds.), Mental Causation. Oxford University Press.
Max Kistler (2005). Lowe's Argument for Dualism From Mental Causation. Philosophia 33 (1-4):319-329.
Added to index2009-01-28
Total downloads440 ( #580 of 1,413,360 )
Recent downloads (6 months)30 ( #6,482 of 1,413,360 )
How can I increase my downloads?