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This chapter deals with the role of reason in human thought and action. A powerful argument against physicalism is the lack, so far, of a suitable account of ‘mental causation’, that is, of the role of reason in brain processes. The problem is often formulated as the question of how the mental properties of brain events can be causally efficacious. Instead, this chapter reformulates the problem in terms of two questions: how is it that series of mental/neural events come to conform to rational (as opposed to merely causal) patterns; and what difference does the possession of mental capacities make to the causal efficacy of an organism's interaction with its environment? The role of beliefs and reasoning in behavior is discussed with respect to these questions.

This chapter argues that many of the standard arguments for the causal inertness of the mental rest on mistaken assumptions about causality and causal explanation. An interventionist account undercuts these assumptions. Interventionism allows for explanations involving macroscopic variables as well as microscopic variables. So, depending on the details of the case, it can explain the causal efficacy and explanatory power of multiple realisable mental states. When it comes to the causal exclusion argument, the chapter rejects the exclusion principle according to which if an event has a sufficient cause, then no distinct event can be a cause of it, unless this is a genuine case of causal overdetermination. An event being causally sufficient for some effect does not exclude some distinct event from causing or being causally relevant to that effect, even in the absence of overdetermination.

The most compelling reason to accept materialism in the philosophy of mind derives from our common commitment to mental causation: inasmuch as mental phenomena are causally efficacious, and inasmuch as whatever has a cause has a physical cause, there is considerable pressure to identify mental with physical phenomena. At the hands of Jaegwon Kim, this argument has been formulated in such a way as to force the choice between eliminativism, since causally inefficacious mental properties would be in some sense unreal; and reductionism, since mental properties are causally efficacious only if they can be physically reduced. This chapter shows that if Kim's argument against antireductionist theories of mind is successful, then his own reductionist theory falls victim to the same plight: for Kim's Supervenience Argument entails that a theory of mind salvages mental causation only if, on that theory, mental properties (1) are multiply realizable; (2) are physically reducible; and (3) have instances that are causally efficacious in virtue of being mental property-instances; yet Kim's reductionist theory is unable jointly to satisfy these conditions. The result is that the argument from mental causation is either too weak to force acceptance of materialism, or too strong to allow for the consistency of mental causation with any theory of mind but classical type physicalism, a theory with well-advertised problems of its own.

Mental causation faces two separate threats: ‘from below’ and ‘from within’. With so much effort gone into distinguishing these threats in recent years, no one seems to have noticed that they are connected, and in a way that makes them more formidable as a package than taken separately. This chapter presents three arguments: that within not an application of the same principle used to defeat below; that below falls to a principle that is tolerant of intentional causation, albeit intentional causation of an interestingly unexpected sort; and that within relies on an enormously stronger principle that undermines just about any intuitive causal relation you care to mention.

The chapter argues that Menzies and List's defence of the claim that higher‐level properties have causal powers independent of those of their physical realizers conflates questions about the causal powers of properties with questions about their explanatory roles. Menzies and List's argument shows only that explanations in terms of higher‐level properties are sometimes more appropriate than explanations in terms of physical properties, but no conclusions about the causal powers of properties can be drawn from this without assuming a questionable version of the interventionist theory of causation.

This chapter shows how, consistently with accepting a fairly strong principle of physical causal closure, a dualistic theory of mental causation can be made plausible by emphasizing the explanatory role that can be accorded to mental states in accounting for what would, in their absence, appear to be mysterious coincidences in the ways in which apparently unconnected physiological events give rise to coordinated bodily movements. It is argued that it is crucial to their occupying this kind of explanatory role that mental states are intentional states and that mental causation is distinctively intentional causation — the bringing about of intended effects.

This paper concerns the results of combining two sets of metaphysical theses. The theses in the first set belong to ontology in the most general sense. They can be summed up in these words: everything is either a substance or a relation (attributes being unary relations and propositions being “0-ary” relations); relations are abstract objects and, therefore, do not enter into causal relations. (Note that it follows from the first thesis that there are no events, because an event would be neither a substance nor a relation.) The second set of theses has to do with causation. They may be summarized as follows: although there are many causal relations—and although there are causal explanations—there is no such relation as “causation;” all causal relations hold between substances. When these two sets of metaphysical theses are combined, they can be seen to have important implications for the philosophy of mind.

Dualist themes in Burge's philosophy of mind are gathered and articulated. Burge's anti-individualism yields an argument against token-identity theory; his reflections on mental causation have a dualist flavor; and he doubts that the relation of mental events to neural events is one of composition or constitution. This chapter argues that compositional materialism about representational mental events would be false just in case a ‘mathematical archangel’, starting from a base of fundamental material facts, could not discern as causally salient the neural event underlying a representational event prior to identifying the representational mental event as such and its causal relations. Burge's doubts about neural composition of the mental could thus be empirically confirmed.

Human action is a kind of magic, an astonishing ability to think of something and thereby make it happen. Perhaps this is why each person views self with awe — The Great Selfini amazes and delights! We are enchanted by the operation of our minds and bodies into believing that we are “uncaused causes”, the origins of our own behavior. Unfortunately, the magic self stands in the way of the scientific understanding of the psychological, neural, and social origins of our behavior and thought. This chapter examines this standoff by outlining the theory of apparent mental causation — a theory of how the self's magic may arise. It then considers why the concept of self as an inner origin of our actions presents such a robust illusion. Finally, the chapter explores why evolution might have unfolded in such a way as to make us think we are magical creatures.

The central focus of this chapter is the comparison between a naturalistic worldview—on which only natural phenomena exist—and a theistic worldview on which God as supernatural exists. The chapter clarifies naturalism and its relation to a scientific approach to understanding the physical world, personhood as understood both for finite persons and for God, and mental causation as essential to agency in any person. This exploration requires considering the relation between the mental and the physical, the possibility of divine embodiment, the intelligibility of surviving bodily death, the notion of explanation, and the conception of simplicity in a worldview.

This chapter argues for two corollaries of this metaphysical conception. First, normative facts, properties, and relations are irreducible and sui generis: they cannot be reduced to natural facts, properties, or relations. (The argument for this corollary relies on an argument that George Bealer has given against functionalism in the philosophy of mind.) Secondly, contrary to what many philosophers hold, they are causally efficacious, and enter into causal explanations of contingent facts about what happens in the world. This view of normative facts as causally efficacious can be defended against objections in much the same way as philosophers of mind have defended mental causation (i.e., the view that mental states are causally efficacious); it is compatible with the modest sort of naturalism that claims that all causal facts are realized in (but not necessarily identical to) natural facts.

The first section characterises the kind of emergence defended in this chapter and situates it largely in the enactive paradigm of consciousness and cognition. The second section begins to cast doubt on physicalism and related doctrines in philosophy of mind that speak against ontological emergence. In the process, it becomes clear that ontological emergence cum enactivism is philosophically sound and potentially scientifically explanatory.

“Two Concepts of Realization, Mental Causation, and Physicalism” compares and evaluates two accounts of realization, the standard second‐order account and Sydney Shoemaker's new “subset” account. According to the standard account, a property realizes another just in case it fills the causal role that defines the realized property. On the subset account, a property realizes another if and only if its causal powers include the causal powers of the realized property as a subset. In his recent book Physical Realization (2007), Shoemaker uses this subset account to vindicate mental causation within nonreductive physicalism. The essay argues that Shoemaker's attempt does not succeed, and that the physicalist framework he defends is best viewed as a form of type physicalism, not nonreductive physicalism.

This chapter deals with the question of how emergent mental events or properties can have ‘downward’ causal efficacy without violating the causal closure of the physical world. It claims that ‘emergence’ needs to be defined in terms of the denial of causal reductionism. Causal antireductionism amounts to the affirmation of top-down or downward causation. The discussion defines ‘downward causation’ in terms of the selection among lower-level causal processes on the basis of their higher-level properties. The mental properties of events have an irreducible role to play in causal processes, in that it is only by virtue of the supervenient mental properties that neural processes become subject to the selective pressures of the environment.

“Can Supervenience and ‘Non‐Strict’ Laws Save Anomalous Monism?” is a reply to Donald Davidson's defense of his anomalous monism against the charge that it leads to epiphenomenalism. In “Thinking Causes” (in Mental Causation, ed. John Heil and Alfred Mele, 1993), Davidson claims that non‐strict psychophysical laws are sufficient to underwrite mental causation, and also that mind‐body supervenience can vindicate the causal relevance of mentality. This paper argues that Davidson is mistaken in his claims, and that even if Davidson were successful in restoring mental causes to anomalous monism, he would run afoul of the problem of causal exclusion. Moreover, Davidson's defense introduces some unwelcome tensions into his overall view of the mind‐body problem.