Causation and Mental Causation: Standpoints and Intersections

Causation has been widely investigated in the recent philosophy of science and theories have been proliferating over the last decades. At the same time, the problem of mental causation has played a pivotal role in recent debates in the philosophy of mind. It seems, however, that little or insufficient dialogue and exchange has been developed between these two fields of research. On the one hand, scholars looking for general interpretations of causation have rarely faced up to issues arising from mental causation, or discussed explicitly the framework and constraints that their proposals impose upon mental causation. On the other hand, philosophers dealing with mental causation have often neglected or underestimated current theories and recent reflections on the nature of causality, avoiding discussion of their possible implications for mental causation. The situation is slowly and gradually changing as an effect, among other things, of epistemological investigations within neuroscience, psychiatry, and clinical psychology, but the relations between philosophical accounts of causation and theories of mental causation are still worth deeper consideration.