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.