Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Physical causal closure is a metaphysical theory about the nature of causation in the physical realm with significant ramifications in the study of metaphysics and the mind. In a strongly stated version, physical causal closure says that "all physical states have pure physical causes" — Jaegwon Kim , [ 1 ] or that "physical effects have only ...
Another question raised by such non-causal theory, is how an agent acts upon reason, if the said intentional actions are spontaneous. Some non-causal explanations involve invoking panpsychism , the theory that a quality of mind is associated with all particles, and pervades the entire universe, in both animate and inanimate entities.
I conclude that even if an episode of agent causation is among the causal antecedents of every voluntary human action, these episodes do nothing to undermine the prima facie impossibility of an undetermined free act." [15] In his book Material Beings, [16] Van Inwagen argues that all material objects are either elementary particles or living ...
Fischer has argued for this response by arguing that the Frankfurt-style case cannot stand alone, but must be taken in conjunction with other arguments. [10] These other arguments are supposed to show that causal determinism in and of itself and apart from ruling out alternate possibilities does not threaten moral responsibility.
Another theory is the identity theory, according to which mental events are (either type- or token-) identical to physical events. A more recent view, known as functionalism, claims that mental events are individuated (or constituted by) the causal role they play. As such, mental events would fit directly into the causal realm, as they are ...
Causal reasoning is the process of identifying causality: the relationship between a cause and its effect.The study of causality extends from ancient philosophy to contemporary neuropsychology; assumptions about the nature of causality may be shown to be functions of a previous event preceding a later one.
Thinking about Consciousness by David Papineau, is a book (published in 2002) about consciousness that describes what Papineau calls the 'Intuition of Distinctness'. He does not so much attempt to prove that materialism is right (although he presents his 'Causal argument' for it in the first chapter) as analyse why dualism seems intuitively plausible.
Thomas Reid, developer of the Agent-Causal theory of freedom. Agent causation, or Agent causality, is a category of determination in metaphysics, where a being who is not an event—namely an agent—can cause events (particularly the agent's own actions). Agent causation contrasts with event causation, which occurs when an event causes another ...