Organon F
Volume 26, February 2019, Issue 1, Pages 122–140
ISSN 2585-7150 (online) ISSN 1335-0668 (print)
Research Article | Special issue on Causality, Free Will, and Divine Action
Active Doings and the Principle of the Causal Closure of the Physical World
Ansgar Beckermann
Some philosophers hold that it would be impossible for us to do something actively if the physical world were causally closed, i.e., if in the physical world all events were caused by other physical events if they are caused at all. The reason for this view is that these philosophers adhere to what I call the traditional picture of action. Recently, Martine Nida-Rümelin tried to defend this picture by phenomenological considerations. According to the traditional picture a behavior can only count as something an agent does actively if it is ultimately caused by the agent in an agent-causal way. In this paper I adduce three arguments against agent causation: (1) We do not really understand what agent causation is. (2) If agent causation were real, we would be confronted with the strange fact that human agents can only cause certain tiny events in the brain. (3) There is no empirical evidence that agent causation is real. In the last part of my paper I present an alternative account of the difference between what agents do actively and what is done to them.
Active doings; agent causation; causal closure of the physical world; free will; Martine Nida-Rümelin; subject causation.
Author
Ansgar Beckermann
Affiliation
Bielefeld University
Address
Department of Philosophy, Bielefeld University, Postfach 10 01 31, D-33501 Bielefeld, Germany
ansgar.beckermann@uni-bielefeld.de
Received
13 July 2018
Accepted
4 December 2018
Published online
22 January 2019
Publishers
Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences
Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences
APA
Beckermann, A. (2019). Active Doings and the Principle of the Causal Closure of the Physical World. Organon F, 26(1), 122–140. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2019.26108
Chicago
Beckermann, Ansgar . 2019. "Active Doings and the Principle of the Causal Closure of the Physical World." Organon F 26 (1): 122–140. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2019.26108
Harvard
Beckermann, A. (2019). Active Doings and the Principle of the Causal Closure of the Physical World. Organon F, 26(1), pp. 122–140. https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2019.26108
© Ansgar Beckermann
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