The Metaphysics of Agency II: And How to Solve It

Abstract

Abstract The only possible ways to reject this line of thought would be to claim either that the principle of the Causal Closure of the Physical or CCP rules out organismic living events as physical events that efficaciously cause other physical events, or that the Causal Exclusion Problems show that organismic life is epiphenomenal. And neither of these options seems in any way philosophically viable, even for the most hardnosed materialist. Although we fully agree with Kim’s critiques of Dualism (whether Sub-stance Dualism, or Property-Dualism-Without-Substance-Dualism) and Non-Reductive Materialism, we also think that he unfairly stacks the deck in favor of solutions based on Reductive Materialism. He does this by adopting a certain interpretation of the highly plausible principle CCP, which says that only physical events can nomologically sufficiently cause physical events. Kim’s interpretation is also the standard interpretation. The standard interpretation of CCP assumes that the fundamental physical properties of the natural world necessarily exclude intrinsic connections with fundamental mental properties.