Austen Friesacher

Physicalism is often characterized by the slogan that “There is nothing over and above the physical.” Thus, making physicalism precise requires making “the physical” precise. In this paper I advance one such way of making the physical precise and in doing so defend a new approach to defining the physical. I argue that a property is physical iff it belongs to the largest strong-component of a causal network that includes exemplary physical properties. This avoids the triviality problem faced by physics-based accounts and withstands an important argument against accounts that are not physics-based.