Mind in a Physical World

A short, tightly argued book, based on Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures at Berkeley and subtitled An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation. Kim argues that the popular middle positions in philosophy of mind, such as non-reductive physicalism, Davidson's anomalous monism and emergentism, cannot account for how the mind makes a difference to the world. He first argues that supervenience on its own is not a theory of the mind–body relation. He then sets out the supervenience (or causal exclusion) argument: if every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause, and mental properties are not physical properties, then mental properties have no causal work left to do, unless we accept systematic overdetermination. After rejecting several attempts to avoid this conclusion, he proposes functional reduction: a mental property is defined by its causal role and identified with whatever realises that role. He grants that conscious qualities may resist this treatment.

It states the causal exclusion problem in its most influential form, and anyone who wants to defend mental causation without reductionism has to answer it.