My book Understanding Mental Causation, published by White Rose University Press, is available for FREE! You can download it here.
On the 12th of May I will be speaking about the book at an event in Leeds!
This is free to attend (there will also be drinks!) and you can book your place here.
To get you in the mood, here's what I will be speaking about:
Ordinary experience suggests that what we do with our bodies causally depends, somehow, on what is going on in our minds. However, the problem of how to understand the causal relationship between mind and body remains.
Contemporary philosophy of mind is shaped by the so-called problem of mental causation.
Mental causation is often presented as a cause-effect relation between mental and physical entities. This view is widely endorsed because it seems like a straightforward explanation of what is going on when people act intentionally. Desires and beliefs are seen as causes of the actions they explain, entailing the existence of causal relations between mental items and physical events.
But is this the right way to understand the causal relationship between mind and body?
In my book, I challenges the orthodox understanding of mental causation by examining the philosophical theories that have generated it.
I argue that three theories are responsible: 1) physicalism, 2) causal theories of intentional action and 3) relational approaches to causation. I believe that this triad of theories, which I call the physicalist triad, has limited our thinking about mental causation and therefore prevented us from exploring more diverse accounts of the relationship between our mind and body.
In the talk, I will outline how we can break out of the physicalist triad in order to open up new ways of understanding mental causation and thereby refresh debates within philosophy of mind.
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