Midterm Exam

Answer the following questions type your answers.  Your answers should be two to four pages.  Your answers are due at the beginning of class on Tuesday, December 10, 2002.  No late exams accepted (but early ones are fine).

Consider the dualist positions of Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz.  How does each writer account for the remarkable correlation between mental and bodily states (e.g., when I will my arm to move, it moves; when light rays hit my eyes, I have conscious visual images)?  In particular, does the solution involve genuine causation, from mind to body?  From body to mind?  If the correlation between mental and physical states is not a causal link, what explains this remarkable correlation?

Next consider the dualist epiphenomenalism of Huxley.  Does he allow any causal interaction between mind and body; if so, what kind(s)?   What kind of problem might arise for mental states, on Huxley's view -- in particular, how would such mental states figure in, say, our scientific theories of the world?  

Compare this to Kim’s comments on non-reductive materialism, such as Putnam’s functionalism, in his article “The Myth of Non-Reductive Materialism”.  What is the “problem of causal-explanatory exclusion” that Kim sees for non-reductive materialism?  What are the principles that he derives this problem from?  Are these principles similar to those that make a dualist worry about mental causation?  Does Kim think non-reductive materialism will face problems similar to those dualists try to address?  Why would Kim be unhappy with the answer that, for example, the epiphenomenalist gives to this problem?