Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind

This book is a collection of 14 essays; 11 of these have been previously published and three are new. All but one of them have been written since 1993 when my essay collection Supervenience and Mind appeared. Essays used in the monographs, Mind in a Physical World and Physicalism, Or Something Near Enough, have been excluded. The book begins with four essays on emergence and related issues; in one way or another, each of these essays raises difficulties for the idea of emergence. In particular, the last essay casts serious doubt on the intelligibility of the very idea of ontological emergence (distinguished from epistemological emergence). These essays are followed by two essays on explanation of action. Both stress the centrality and priority of the agent's first-person point of view in understanding actions. The second of the two, which is new, develops an agent-centered normative account of action explanation, in opposition to the prevailing third-person approaches such as the causal and nomological models. The next group of four essays addresses various issues about explanation, such as explanatory realism, explanatory exclusion, reduction and reductive explanation, and what a philosophical theory of explanation should be like. Mental causation and physicalism are the concerns of the next three papers. One of these examines Donald Davidson's defense of mental causation within his anomalous monism. Another discusses Sydney Shoemaker's recent analysis of realization (the "subset view") and his defense of mental causation. The last essay of the book addresses the issue of laws in the special sciences, offering three arguments to show that there are no such laws.