Lise.Marie.Andersen@mq.edu.au
Degree: PhD
Thesis topic:  Mental causation
Supervisor: Professor Peter Menzies
Associate Supervisor: Dr Albert Atkin
Scholarship: Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship (MQRES)

My field of research is mental causation with particular focus on interventionist and contrastive accounts of causation and their potential for dealing with the exclusion problem for mental causal powers.

When I say that my desire to do a PhD at Macquarie University caused me to travel to Australia, I am assuming that my mental states can make a difference to my behaviour and the physical world. This is a common sense psychological assumption but it is also a fundamental assumption of scientific psychology. However, if we also assume that every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause, then there seems to be no causal work left for mental properties and thus no room for mental causation in the physical world.

Rejecting the assumption that beliefs, desires, intentions etc. cause the body to move would challenge our concept of voluntary action. Insofar as scientific psychological explanations involve mental causation, questioning the possibility of mental causation also questions the possibility of psychology making law-based explanations of human behaviour. A solution to the problem of causal exclusion thus seems vital for both the coherence of our common sense understanding of human agency and the nomological status of scientific psychology. In this way the issues of mental causation are of importance not only to philosophy but also to the fields of, for example, psychology, cognitive science, and psychiatry.

 

Recent Presentations:

• ‘Causal Sufficiency –The Real Problem of Mental Causation’ Decision and Causation Workshop, Sydney University, April 2010
• ‘Interventionism and Mental Causation – Problem Solved?’, Work in Progress Seminar, Macquarie University, November 2009.

• ‘Mental Causation and Multiple Realizability’, Metaphysics of Mind, PG conference, University of Edinburgh, June 2009
• ‘Stained brains and Multiple Realizability’, Australasian Postgraduate Philosophy Conference, Macquarie University June 2009.

Previous degrees

• B.A. in philosophy, Aarhus University, Denmark 2006
• Msc by Reseach in Philosophy of mind and cognition, University of Edinburgh 2007

Teaching

• Critical Thinking, Tutor, Macquarie University 2010

• Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics, Tutor, Macquarie University 2008, 2009
• Kickstart School Outreach Programme. Introduction to Philosophy of Mind. July 2007. University of Edinburgh (Together with Mog Stapleton and Tom Roberts)
• Philosophy of Mind and Language, Tutor, University of  Edinburgh 2006
• Metaphysics and Epistemology, Tutor, Aarhus University 2005

Edited books

• Lise Marie Andersen, Hanne F. Skovmose, Simon Laumann Jørgensen: "Folkeskolens Filosofi: Idealer, Tendenser og Kritik." (Philosophy of Education - Ideals, Trends and Critique), 2008, Philosophia Press, Aarhus