Department of Philosophy
Seminar Abstracts - 2009
26th May: Peter Menzies - Mental Causation in a Physical World
Not much of commonsense psychology makes sense if mental states are not causally efficacious. Physicalists about the mind who claim that mental states at the very least supervene or depend on physical states of the brain strive hard to vindicate mental causation. However, a simple argument seems to show that physicalists must repudiate mental causation. The argument is related to Jaegwon Kim's famous Exclusion Argument, though it targets physicalism of both the reductive and non-reductive varieties. Like Kim's argument, the new argument relies on a crucial exclusion assumption about causation: mental states cannot make a difference to behaviour when they supervene on physical states that are already causally sufficient to bring about the behaviour. This paper explores the extent to which this exclusion assumption is supported by different theories of causation. It argues that while a simple counterfactual theory of causation falsifies the assumption in its original form, it actually verifies a more plausible, reformulated version of the assumption under special conditions. The paper draws out some surprising consequences of this result. It argues that far from supporting the new exclusion argument against physicalism, the result actually vindicates the non-reductivist physicalist's claim that the mental is causally autonomous from the physical.
3rd March: Catharine Abell - Cinema as a Reresentational Art
Roger Scruton has argued that cinema cannot be a representational art form because the way in which cinematic works represent their objects cannot be a source of aesthetic value. His argument depends on certain assumptions about both the nature of photography and the features required for something to have aesthetic value as a representation. I grant him these assumptions. I argue that, as it stands, Scruton's argument does not pose a general threat to the existence of cinematic works of representational art, since it encompasses only works produced by photographing theatrical performances. I propose a general account of cinematic representation. This account appears to extend the scope of Scruton's argument to all photographically-produced cinematic works. However, I argue, it in fact undermines his argument. Cinematic works of all kinds can be representational artworks."
