David Robb

An adequate solution to the problem of mental causation should deliver, not just the efficacy of mental properties, but the efficacy of mental properties as such, of mentality in its own right. But this appears to block an identity solution from the outset. Any property that’s both mental and physical, the argument goes, has a dual nature, and this just reintroduces the problem of mental causation, now framed in terms of these two natures. But a powers ontology promises to save the identity theory, at least from this problem. Such an ontology identifies a mental property’s mental and physical “natures” with just the property itself. A mental property is, at once, both wholly mental and wholly physical, so that to causally engage the physical nature of a mental property is to engage its mental nature as well.

This book ranks with the best of contemporary work on the metaphysics of causation, both because of its thorough and unified treatment of the literature and because its author faces head-on the most difficult foundational questions about causality: How, at the most basic level, do causes bring about their effects? What are the mechanisms operating in the world to bind its parts together? Ehring’s answers to these questions are clear, original, and supported by sophisticated arguments. The book is a fine example of what C. B. Martin calls “ontological seriousness,” a concern for the truthmakers of our causal claims, for figuring out how causality works at the most fundamental level.