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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 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 ...
As a result of these arguments and others that build upon them, the dominant theory in philosophy of mind since the 1960s has been a version of non-reductive physicalism based on multiple realizability. [10] In 1988, Hilary Putnam used multiple realizability to argue against functionalism. Noting that functionalism is essentially a watered-down ...
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 ...
Parallelism is a theory which is related to dualism and which suggests that although there is a correlation between mental and physical events there is not any causal relationship. The body and mind do not interact with each other but simply operate independently of each other, in parallel , and there happens to be a correspondence between the ...
The first principle, which most ontological physicalists would accept, is the causal closure of the physical domain, according to which, every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause. The second principle Kim notes is that of causal exclusion, which holds that no normal event can have more than one sufficient cause.
If an instance in which the phenomenon under investigation occurs, and an instance in which it does not occur, have every circumstance save one in common, that one occurring only in the former; the circumstance in which alone the two instances differ, is the effect, or cause, or an indispensable part of the cause, of the phenomenon.
Pluralized causal principle - there are pluralized versions of universal causation, that allow exceptions to the principle. Robert K. Meyer's causal chain principle, [15] uses set theory axioms, assumes that something must cause itself in set of causes and so universal causation doesn't exclude self-causation. Against infinite regress.