Mental Causation and Ontology

This book demonstrates the importance of ontology for a central debate in philosophy of mind. Mental causation seems an obvious aspect of the world. But it is hard to understand how it can happen unless we get clear about what the entities involved in the process are. An international team of contributors presents new work on this problem. In particular, they examine the nature of causes and effects, the nature of properties, and the nature of the causal relation.

Sophie Gibb is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Durham. She is the author of many journal papers and essays in edited collections, and was awarded the Dialectica essay prize for in 2007.

E. J. Lowe is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Durham, and has published over 200 articles on metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and action, the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of language, and early modern philosophy. His books include The Possibility of Metaphysics (OUP, 1998), A Survey of Metaphysics (OUP, 2002), The Four-Category Ontology (OUP, 2005), and Personal Agency (OUP, 2008).

R. D. Ingthorsson is a researcher at Lund University in Sweden, and has published articles in The European Journal of Philosophy, Metaphysica, Axiomathes, and the Sats-Nordic Journal of Philosophy.

Introduction, Sophie Gibb
1. Mental Causation, John Heil
2. Physical Realization without Preemption, Sydney Shoemaker
3. Mental Causation in the Physical World, Peter Menzies
4. Mental Causation: Ontology and Patterns of Variation, Paul Noordhof
5. Causation is Macroscopic but not Irreducible, David Papineau
6. Substance Causation, Powers, and Human Agency, E. J. Lowe
7. Agent Causation in a Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics, Jonathan D. Jacobs and Timothy O'Connor
8. Mental Causation and Double Prevention, Sophie Gibb
9. The Identity Theory as a Solution to the Exclusion Problem, David Robb
10. Continuant Causation, Fundamentality, and Freedom, Peter Simons
11. There is no Exclusion Problem, Steinvor Tholl Arnadottir and Tim Crane
Index