Seventy Years in Philosophy of Mind: An Overview, with Emphasis on the Issue of Mental Causation

Abstract

This paper is an opinionated overview of major developments in philosophy of mind during the past seventy years, with emphasis on the issue of mental causation. Its most prominent positions all embrace a broadly “naturalistic” or “materialistic” conception of human beings, and of mentalityand its place in nature. Included in this paper are discussions of analytical behaviorism, the psychophysical identity theory, functionalism, multiplerealizability and strong multiple realizability, supervenience, the causal exclusion problem, phenomenal mental states, wide content, contextualist causal compatibilism, agentive phenomenology, and the agent-exclusion problem.