OLOFOS - Thousand problems of mental causation, and why supervenience is still one of them

Rencontre avec Anna Drozdzewska (UCL) organisée dans le cadre des séminaires OLOFOS "Scientific représentation(s) of causation"

I will begin this talk by discussing (1) the menaces who are lurking for the causal efficacy of mental events (i.e. the famous Causal Exclusion argument) and (2) the most common ways to argue that mental causation can still be seen as a valid possibility regardless. I will also cover the reasons why the current, most popular approaches, including interventionism, fall short on their promises to account for the causal efficacy of the mental.

I will hypothesize that finding the solution to the problem might require going back to the core assumptions of the discussions, and entangle the two issues: the ontological existence of the mental and its causality.