MENTALCAUSE · The Ontology of Mental Causation

The proposal being submitted is an interdisciplinary project belonging to the area of ontology of mind. The long-term goal of the project is to find an answer to the question whether a consistent conception of events, properties and agents can be proposed and defended which would make it possible to speak about irreducible, causally potent, mental factors. Subsequent research stages of the project are: (1) The analysis of anti-dualistic arguments: the supervenience argument, the exclusion argument, the overdetermination argument; (2) The comparative and reductive analysis of causal relata; (3) The analysis of causal relation; (4) The analysis of dispositional properties; (5) The ontology of subjects of experience as rational selves and free agents. As a result of the research project, I expect: (i) preparing and developing an adequate terminology in which issues in mental causation can be framed; (ii) analysing the problem of causal relata and causal relation itself and formulating basic theses in otology of properties, events and agents; (iii) reconstructing and critically analysing anti-dualistic arguments; (iv) recognizing interconnections between various groups of metaphysical and scientific problems intertwined with such notions as overdetermination, causal closure of the physical domain, realization, determination, ontological dependence and emergence; (v) critically analysing some of the options within the mental causation debate such as anomalous monism, reductive and non-reductive physicalism and emergent dualism; (vi) developing a sufficiently rich ontology of the human person which will be in position to deliver persuasive answers to the most frequent questions that appear within the mental causation debate and the metaphysics of human being.