Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays

by Jaegwon Kim , General editor Ernest Sosa

• ISBN13: 9780521439961
• ISBN10: 0521439965
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-11-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Jaegwon Kim is one of the most pre-eminent and most influential contributors to the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This collection of essays presents the core of his work on supervenience and mind with two sets of postscripts especially written for the book. The essays focus on such issues as the nature of causation and events, what dependency relations other than causal relations connect facts and events, the analysis of supervenience, and the mind-body problem. A central problem in the philosophy of mind is the problem of explaining how the mind can causally influence bodily processes. Professor Kim explores this problem in detail, criticises the nonreductionist solution of it, and offers a modified reductionist solution of his own. Both professional philosophers and their graduate students will find this an invaluable collection.

Table of Contents

Preface
Sources
Events and supervenience
Causation, nomic subsumption, and the concept of event	p. 3
Noncausal connections	p. 22
Events as property exemplifications	p. 33
Concepts of supervenience	p. 53
"Strong" and "global" supervenience revisited	p. 79
Epiphenomenal and supervenient causation	p. 92
Supervenience for multiple domains	p. 109
Supervenience as a philosophical concept	p. 131
Postscripts on supervenience	p. 161
Mind and mental causation
Psychophysical supervenience	p. 175
Psychophysical laws	p. 194
What is "naturalized epistemology"?	p. 216
Mechanism, purpose, and explanatory exclusion	p. 237
The myth of nonreductive materialism	p. 265
Dretske on how reasons explain behavior	p. 285
Multiple realization and the metaphysics of reduction	p. 309
The nonreductivist's troubles with mental causation	p. 336
Postscripts on mental causadon	p. 358
Index	p. 369
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