Mental Causation and Nonreductive Physicalism, an Unhappy Marriage?

Peter Menzies is among those contemporary philosophers of mind who have tried most deliberately to make mental causation compatible with nonreductive physicalism, thus proving the invalidity of Kim's causal exclusion argument (Kim 2005, p. 17). The compatibility between mental causation and nonreductive physicalism will be the focus of this essay. In the first part, I shall expound the tenets of Menzies' theory of mental causation. In the second, I shall emphasise the difficulties his theory encounters, that jeopardise his attempt to reconcile mental causation with physicalism, even though the sort of physicalism he champions takes a quite liberal shape.