Abstract
In ‘The Mental Causation Debate’ (1995), I pointed out the parallel between the
premises in some traditional arguments for physicalism and the assumptions which
give rise to the problem of mental causation. I argued that the dominant contemporary
version of physicalism finds mental causation problematic because it accepts the main
premises of the traditional arguments, but rejects their conclusion: the identification
of mental with physical causes. Moreover, the orthodox way of responding to this
problem (which I call the ‘constitution view’) implicitly rejects an assumption hidden
in the original argument for physicalism: the assumption that mental and physical
causation are the same kind of relation (‘homogeneity’). The conclusion of my paper
was that if you reject homogeneity, then there is no obvious need for an account of
the relation between mental and physical properties.