Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

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What is the problem of mental causation?

Jaegwon Kim

pp. 319-329

Abstract

Giving an account of mental causation — in particular, explaining how it is possible for the mental to causally affect the physical — has been one of the central problems in the philosophy of mind over the past decade or so. The problem of course is not new: Descartes famously was confronted by many of his contemporaries — for example, Gassendi and Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia — with the same question. But this does not mean that Descartes' problem is our problem. For his problem, as his contemporaries saw it, arose from his substantival dualism, a dualism of material and mental substance. But, at least for most of us, that is not the source of our worries about mental causation. Few of us now believe in the existence of substantival minds or some kind of mind-stuff that is ontologically independent of material bodies.

Publication details

Published in:

Doets Kees, Mundici Daniele (1997) Structures and norms in science: volume two of the tenth international congress of logic, methodology and philosophy of science, Florence, august 1995. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 319-329

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-0538-7_19

Full citation:

Kim Jaegwon (1997) „What is the problem of mental causation?“, In: K. Doets & D. Mundici (eds.), Structures and norms in science, Dordrecht, Springer, 319–329.