Mental Causation: Unnaturalized but not Unnatural

Marcus, Eric. “Mental causation: Unnaturalized but not unnatural.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63, no. 1 (2001): 57-83.
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The central problem for a realist about mental causation is to show that mental causation is compatible with the causal completeness of physical systems. This problem has seemed intractable in large part because of a widely held view that any sort of systematic overdetermination of events by their causes is unacceptable. I account for the popularity of this view, but argue that we ought to reject it. In doing so. I show how we thereby undermine the idea that mental causes must be naturalizable in order to be legitimate. Thus I argue that a non-naturalist conception of mental causation is compatible with a plausible kind of physicalism.

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