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Author: Eric Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065336
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
We explain what people think and do by citing their reasons, but how do such explanations work, and what do they tell us about the nature of reality? Contemporary efforts to address these questions are often motivated by the worry that our ordinary conception of rationality contains a kernel of supernaturalism-a ghostly presence that meditates on sensory messages and orchestrates behavior on the basis of its ethereal calculations. In shunning this otherworldly conception, contemporary philosophers have focused on the project of "naturalizing" the mind, viewing it as a kind of machine that converts sensory input and bodily impulse into thought and action. Eric Marcus rejects this choice between physicalism and supernaturalism as false and defends a third way. He argues that philosophers have failed to take seriously the idea that rational explanations postulate a distinctive sort of causation-rational causation. Rational explanations do not reveal the same sorts of causal connections that explanations in the natural sciences do. Rather, rational causation draws on the theoretical and practical inferential abilities of human beings. Marcus defends this position against a wide array of physicalist arguments that have captivated philosophers of mind for decades. Along the way he provides novel views on, for example, the difference between rational and nonrational animals and the distinction between states and events.
Author: Eric Marcus
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065336
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279
Get Book
Book Description
We explain what people think and do by citing their reasons, but how do such explanations work, and what do they tell us about the nature of reality? Contemporary efforts to address these questions are often motivated by the worry that our ordinary conception of rationality contains a kernel of supernaturalism-a ghostly presence that meditates on sensory messages and orchestrates behavior on the basis of its ethereal calculations. In shunning this otherworldly conception, contemporary philosophers have focused on the project of "naturalizing" the mind, viewing it as a kind of machine that converts sensory input and bodily impulse into thought and action. Eric Marcus rejects this choice between physicalism and supernaturalism as false and defends a third way. He argues that philosophers have failed to take seriously the idea that rational explanations postulate a distinctive sort of causation-rational causation. Rational explanations do not reveal the same sorts of causal connections that explanations in the natural sciences do. Rather, rational causation draws on the theoretical and practical inferential abilities of human beings. Marcus defends this position against a wide array of physicalist arguments that have captivated philosophers of mind for decades. Along the way he provides novel views on, for example, the difference between rational and nonrational animals and the distinction between states and events.
Author: Milja Kurki
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139470760
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
World political processes, such as wars and globalisation, are engendered by complex sets of causes and conditions. Although the idea of causation is fundamental to the field of International Relations, what the concept of cause means or entails has remained an unresolved and contested matter. In recent decades ferocious debates have surrounded the idea of causal analysis, some scholars even questioning the legitimacy of applying the notion of cause in the study of International Relations. This book suggests that underlying the debates on causation in the field of International Relations is a set of problematic assumptions (deterministic, mechanistic and empiricist) and that we should reclaim causal analysis from the dominant discourse of causation. Milja Kurki argues that reinterpreting the meaning, aims and methods of social scientific causal analysis opens up multi-causal and methodologically pluralist avenues for future International Relations scholarship.
Author: Dominik Perler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351379380
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
This book re-examines the roles of causation and cognition in early modern philosophy. The standard historical narrative suggests that early modern thinkers abandoned Aristotelian models of formal causation in favor of doctrines that appealed to relations of efficient causation between material objects and cognizers. This narrative has been criticized in recent scholarship from at least two directions. Scholars have emphasized that we should not think of the Aristotelian tradition in such monolithic terms, and that many early modern thinkers did not unequivocally reduce all causation to efficient causation. In line with this general approach, this book features original essays written by leading experts in early modern philosophy. It is organized around five guiding questions: What are the entities involved in causal processes leading to cognition? What type(s) or kind(s) of causality are at stake? Are early modern thinkers confined to efficient causation or do other types of causation play a role? What is God's role in causal processes leading to cognition? How do cognitive causal processes relate to other, non-cognitive causal processes? Is the causal process in the case of human cognition in any way special? How does it relate to processes involved in the case of non-human cognition? The essays explore how fifteen early modern thinkers answered these questions: Francisco Suárez, René Descartes, Louis de la Forge, Géraud de Cordemoy, Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ralph Cudworth, Margaret Cavendish, John Locke, John Sergeant, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. The volume is unique in that it explores both well-known and understudied historical figures, and in that it emphasizes the intimate relationship between causation and cognition to open up new perspectives on early modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics.
Author: Christopher Gregory Weaver
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315449072
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Fundamental Causation addresses issues in the metaphysics of deterministic singular causation, the metaphysics of events, property instances, facts, preventions, and omissions, as well as the debate between causal reductionists and causal anti-reductionists. The book also pays special attention to causation and causal structure in physics. Weaver argues that causation is a multigrade obtaining relation that is transitive, irreflexive, and asymmetric. When causation is singular, deterministic and such that it relates purely contingent events, the relation is also universal, intrinsic, and well-founded. He shows that proper causal relata are events understood as states of substances at ontological indices. He then proves that causation cannot be reduced to some non-causal base, and that the best account of that relation should be unashamedly primitivist about the dependence relation that underwrites its very nature. The book demonstrates a distinctive realist and anti-reductionist account of causation by detailing precisely how the account outperforms reductionist and competing anti-reductionist accounts in that it handles all of the difficult cases while overcoming all of the general objections to anti-reductionism upon which other anti-reductionist accounts falter. This book offers an original and interesting view of causation and will appeal to scholars and advanced students in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of physics.
Author: James Woodward
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197585418
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 425
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Book Description
The past few decades have seen an explosion of research on causal reasoning in philosophy, computer science, and statistics, as well as descriptive work in psychology. In Causation with a Human Face, James Woodward integrates these lines of research and argues for an understanding of how each can inform the other: normative ideas can suggest interesting experiments, while descriptive results can suggest important normative concepts. Woodward's overall framework builds on the interventionist treatment of causation that he developed in Making Things Happen. Normative ideas discussed include proposals about the role of invariant or stable relationships in successful causal reasoning and the notion of proportionality. He argues that these normative ideas are reflected in the causal judgments that people actually make as a descriptive matter. Woodward also discusses the common philosophical practice-particularly salient in philosophical accounts of causation--of appealing to intuitions or judgments about cases in support of philosophical theses. He explores how, properly understood, such appeals are not different in principle from appeals to results from empirical research, and demonstrates how they may serve as a useful source of information about causal cognition.
Author: Martin Gerwin
Publisher: Archway Publishing
ISBN: 1480856835
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Many have thought that if everything is caused, human free will must be an illusion. This kind of determinism, however, is seemingly antithetical to our lived experience of the world. In Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will, philosopher Martin Gerwin argues that there is no reason to doubt that we have free will rather, the illusion is that everything is caused in the same deterministic way. Our very idea of cause and effect is rooted in our experience of being agents who make things happen. But from this experience we derive not a single, unified idea of causation, but an idea with different variants. Gerwin traces the evolution of this agency view of causality in Western philosophy over the past three centuries. He explores its relation to the canons of scientific explanation and the findings of quantum mechanics. He also offers a brief formal development of a tensed modal logic that serves to articulate the distinctive sense of I can stemming from the experience of agency. The result is a fresh, innovative defence of the possibility of free will.
Author: Tad M. Schmaltz
Publisher: Oxford Philosophical Concepts
ISBN: 0199782172
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
"This volume is a contribution to the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series, the main goal of which is to provide historical accounts of the development of central philosophical concepts. Among these concepts would seem to be that of efficient causation (or, today, simply causation). Causation is now commonly supposed to involve a succession that instantiates some law-like regularity. This understanding of causality has a history that includes various interrelated conceptions of efficient causation that date from ancient Greek philosophy and that extend to contemporary discussions of causation in metaphysics and philosophy of science. The consideration here of this history is divided into three sections comprising eleven chapters total. The first section concerns concepts of efficient causation in Aristotle, the Stoics, late antiquity and earlier medieval philosophy, and later medieval philosophy dating from Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) to Ockham. The second concerns the different forms of this concept in the modern period, starting with late scholasticism (as represented in Suaréz) and Descartes, and including Spinoza and Leibniz, Malebranche and Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Finally, there is a third section divided into a consideration of conceptions of causation in contemporary philosophy that derive from the work of Hume and Aristotle, respectively. A distinctive feature of the volume is that it also includes four short "Reflections" that explore the significance of the concept of efficient causation for literature, the history of music, the history of science and contemporary art theory"--
Author: Neil Campbell
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433103742
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 128
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Book Description
How do mental events such as choices and decisions lead to physical action? The problem of mental causation is one of the most important and intriguing philosophical issues of our time and has been at the centre of debates in the philosophy of mind for the past fifty years. In opposition to the recent wave of reductionist theories, this book argues that it is possible to account for mental causation within a nonreductive framework as it adopts a broadly Davidsonian approach to mental causation: reasons cause actions because they are identical to physical events. This work then defends this approach from the frequently raised criticism that it entails epiphenomenalism - the inefficacy of the mental. Moreover, Mental Causation moves beyond Davidson's views by reconsidering the question of whether reasons causally explain actions, arguing in opposition to Davidson, that explanations appealing to reasons represent a distinct category of explanation from causal explanation. Essential reading for anyone interested in debates about mental causation, this is an excellent text for senior undergraduates, graduate students, and professional philosophers.
Author: Sven Walter
Publisher: Imprint Academic
ISBN: 9780907845461
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
This book presents a range of essays on the conceptual foundations of physicalism, mental causation and human agency.
Author: Synthetic Society
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 582
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Book Description
