During the period 1860-1880, a number of physicists and mathematicians, including Maxwell, Stewart, Cournot and Boussinesq, used theories formulated in terms of physics to argue that the mind, the soul or a vital principle could have an impact on the body. This paper shows that what was primarily at stake for these authors was a concern about the irreducibility of life and the mind to physics, and that their theories can be regarded primarily as reactions to the law of conservation (...) of energy, which was used among others by Helmholtz and Du Bois-Reymond as an argument against the possibility of vital and mental causes in physiology. In light of this development, Maxwell, Stewart, Cournot and Boussinesq showed that it was still possible to argue for the irreducibility of life and the mind to physics, through an appeal to instability or indeterminism in physics: if the body is an unstable or physically indeterministic system, an immaterial principle can act through triggering or directing motions in the body, without violating the laws of physics. (shrink)

It is widely thought that there is an important argument to be made that starts with premises taken from the science of physics and ends with the conclusion of physicalism. The standard view is that this argument takes the form of a causal argument for physicalism. Roughly, physics tells us that the physical realm is causally complete, and so minds (among other entities) must be physical if they are to interact with the world as we think they do. In what (...) follows, I raise problems for this view. After an initial review of the causal argument, I begin my case by showing that the totality of physical truths do not deductively entail the causal completeness of the physical realm, using a double-prevention scenario and causation by omission to show that nonphysical causes of physical effects would not need to violate physical conservation laws. I then move on to raise problems for an inductive argument for causal completeness by drawing on the neo-Russellian view that there is no causation in fundamental physics, and so causation must itself be a realized or derived entity. I conclude by suggesting that the underlying problem is that the causal argument has fallen out of touch with the sophisticated understanding that philosophers have developed of the role of causation within physics. (shrink)

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2012v16n2p255 O artigo investiga se o naturalismo biológico (a solução de John Searle para o problema mente-corpo) pode ser considerado uma concepção fisicalista acerca da mente. Apesar de defender um fisicalismo a respeito dos particulares (seção 2), Searle adere ao argumento básico dos dualistas para a irredutibilidade das propriedades mentais (seção 3), e não consegue fundamentar sua alegação de que tal irredutibilidade é compatível com o fisicalismo (seção 4). Desse modo, sua teoria da mente se revela como um dualismo de (...) propriedades. (shrink)

‘God needs no instruments to act,’ Malebranche writes in Search 6.2.3; “it suffices that He wills in order that a thing be, because it is a contradiction that He should will and that what He wills should not happen. Therefore, His power is His will”. After nearly identical language in Treatise 1.12, Malebranche writes that “[God's] wills are necessarily efficacious … His power differs not at all from His will”. God exercises His causal power, here, via His volitions; what He (...) causes depends not merely on the fact that He wills, but specifically on the content of His volitions, on “what He wills.” Yet despite the obviously key role the ordinary notion of volitional content plays for Malebranche, recent writers have paid surprisingly little attention either to it or its exegetical implications. I hope partly to rectify this situation here.The plan of this paper is this: to borrow current work in the philosophy of mind to sketch the notion of an incomplete volition, i.e. one whose content is ‘incomplete’ in a sense to be explained; to note that Malebranche accepts and uses something like this notion. (shrink)

‘God needs no instruments to act,’ Malebranche writes in Search 6.2.3; “it suffices that He wills in order that a thing be, because it is a contradiction that He should will and that what He wills should not happen. Therefore, His power is His will”. After nearly identical language in Treatise 1.12, Malebranche writes that “[God's] wills are necessarily efficacious … His power differs not at all from His will”. God exercises His causal power, here, via His volitions; what He (...) causes depends not merely on the fact that He wills, but specifically on the content of His volitions, on “what He wills.” Yet despite the obviously key role the ordinary notion of volitional content plays for Malebranche, recent writers have paid surprisingly little attention either to it or its exegetical implications. I hope partly to rectify this situation here.The plan of this paper is this: to borrow current work in the philosophy of mind to sketch the notion of an incomplete volition, i.e. one whose content is ‘incomplete’ in a sense to be explained; to note that Malebranche accepts and uses something like this notion. (shrink)

The conservation of energy law, a law of physics that states that the total energy of any closed system is always conserved, is a bedrock principle that has achieved both broad theoretical and experimental support. Yet if interactive dualism is correct, it is thought that the mind can affect physical objects in violation of the conservation of energy. Thus, some claim, the conservation of energy grounds an argument for physicalism. Although critics of the argument focus on the implausibility of causation (...) requiring the transference of energy, I argue that even if causation requires the transference of energy, once we accept the other required premises of the argument that lie behind any supposed argument from the conservation of energy the law of the conservation of energy is revealed as irrelevant to the question of whether the mental is physical. (shrink)

The conservation of energy law, a law of physics that states that the total energy of any closed system is always conserved, is a bedrock principle that has achieved both broad theoretical and experimental support. Yet if interactive dualism is correct, it is thought that the mind can affect physical objects in violation of the conservation of energy. Thus, some claim, the conservation of energy grounds an argument for physicalism. Although critics of the argument focus on the implausibility of causation (...) requiring the transference of energy, I argue that even if causation requires the transference of energy, once we accept the other required premises of the argument that lie behind any supposed argument from the conservation of energy the law of the conservation of energy is revealed as irrelevant to the question of whether the mental is physical. (shrink)

: This paper presents a detailed account of Descartes' derivation of his second law of nature—the law of rectilinear motion—from a priori metaphysical principles. Unlike the other laws the proof of the second depends essentially on a metaphysical assumption about the temporal immediacy of God's operation. Recent commentators (e.g., Des Chene and Garber) have not adequately explained the precise role of this assumption in the proof and Descartes' reasoning has continued to seem somewhat arbitrary as a result. My account better (...) reveals the dependence of the second law on fundamental principles about time and causality. (shrink)

Making a history of the principle of inertia, as of any other principle or concept, is a complex but still possible operation. In this work it has been chosen to make a back story which seemed the most natural way for a reconstruction. On the way back, it has been decided to stop at the 6th century CE with the contribution of Ioannes Philoponus. The principle he stated, although very different from the modern one, is certainly associated with it. Going (...) back in time it is still possible and of course one could proceed to the origins of the homo sapiens who perhaps posed the problem of why a club thrown with his hand could go so far from him. But the similarities that one can find with the modern principle are very vague, too perhaps. Without going so far one could see an embryonic idea of the principle of inertia in the atomistic theory of Democritus in the 5th century BCE. The motion of atoms whirling with no apparent reason can suggest the idea that a body can also move with no reason. But the transition from the atom, a metaphysical being, to the body, an empirical being, is far from immediate. (shrink)

The purpose of this dissertation is to defend Pierre Fermat and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz against the charge of error made against them by Pierre Maupertuis that they errantly applied final causes to physics. This charge came in Maupertuis’ 1744 speech to the Paris Academy of Sciences, later published in different versions, entitled Accord Between Different Laws Which at First Seemed Incompatible. It is in this speech that Maupertuis lays claim to one of the most important discoveries in the history of (...) physics and science, The Principle of Least Action. From the date of this speech up until the end of the twentieth century, Maupertuis was credited with this discovery. Fermat discovered least time in optical physics, and Leibniz co-discovered infinitesimal calculus. When the credited discoverer of least action in physics accuses the discoverer of least time in optics and the co-discoverer of infinitesimal calculus of error before and audience of mathematicians, physicists and scientists, it is an event that calls out for investigation. The idea of final causes in physics is the idea that bodies move for an end purpose. During the early modern period, this challenged the intellectual establishment of the day with the idea of thinking in nature. The question which fueled the research for this dissertation is why such a man would accuse two other prominent intellects with such an unprovable metaphysical assumption. The research for this project started with a study of the positions of all three of these men regarding final causes in physics. The second phase was to research the historical context in which Accord Between Different Laws Which at First Seemed Incompatible was written and delivered. This context included the life of Maupertuis as member of the Paris Academy of Sciences and as later President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. It also included the workings of three highly competitive, state funded, academies of science in Berlin, London and Paris. Research showed that no formal positions were held on the subject of final causes by either Maupertuis or Fermat. Only Leibniz demonstrated an established and well thought out position on the subject. Research did reveal the story of an ambitious man in Maupertuis, who made it the fulfillment of his ambition to rise in the ranks of math and science within the academies and establish himself as an intellectual great in European culture. Consequently, the life and career of Maupertuis illustrates the sociological dimension of scientific achievement. Accord Between Different Laws Which at First Seemed Incompatible turned out to be a politically calculated speech delivered for the purpose of career advancement. In 1744, Maupertuis was being considered by the King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, and the leadership of the Berlin Academy of Science for the presidency of that institution. Maupertuis knew this. Therefore, the work must be interpreted in this context. Consequently, the charge of error against Fermat and Leibniz by Maupertuis must be interpreted likewise. Discovery was made in contextual and Leibnizian research that Maupertuis was aware of Leibniz’s idea of action from 1738 on, and knowingly claimed to have discovered a generalized notion of action in physics which was not his. It is the story of ambition clouding human judgment. The Leibnizians attacked Maupertuis on this matter, led by a member of the Berlin Academy named Samuel Konig. In the “Konig Affair”, Konig accused Maupertuis of what is essentially plagiarism, and Maupertuis countered with charging Konig with forgery for claiming to have in his possession a letter from Leibniz to Jacob Hermann demonstrating Leibniz’s knowledge of least action. Maupertuis buries Konig in legal proceedings, but loses his reputation in the process. During the final stages of the Konig affair, Maupertuis admits to Patrick d’Arcy, a member of the Paris academy, that he had used Leibniz’s theory of action. Having lost his effective leadership as President of the Berlin Academy, Maupertuis spends the last years of his life in his native France without ever relinquishing his title and office. When at first examining the charge of error, the immediate notion is that this is a cause and effect argument. It appears to be an argument about the order of metaphysics before physics. This turns out not to be the case. Maupertuis agrees with Fermat and Leibniz at every turn. The charge is all about career success. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that before the introduction of quantum mechanics, determinism was a straightforward consequence of the laws of mechanics. However, around the nineteenth century, many physicists, for various reasons, did not regard determinism as a provable feature of physics. This is not to say that physicists in this period were not committed to determinism; there were some physicists who argued for fundamental indeterminism, but most were committed to determinism in some sense. However, for them, determinism was often not (...) a provable feature of physical theory, but rather an a priori principle or a methodological presupposition. Determinism was strongly connected with principles of causality and continuity and the principle of sufficient reason; this thesis examines the relevance of these principles in the history of physics. Moreover, the history of determinism in this period shows that there were essential changes in the relation between mathematics and physics: whereas in the eighteenth century, there were metaphysical arguments which lent support to differential calculus, by the early twentieth century the development of rigorous foundations of differential calculus led to concerns about its applicability in physics. The thesis consists of six papers. In the first paper, "On the origins and foundations of Laplacian determinism", I argue that Laplace, who is usually pointed out as the first major proponent of scientific determinism, did not derive his statement of determinism directly from the laws of mechanics; rather, his determinism has a background in eighteenth century Leibnizian metaphysics, and is ultimately based on the law of continuity and the principle of sufficient reason. These principles also provided a basis for the idea that one can find laws of nature in the form of differential equations which uniquely determine natural processes. In "The Norton dome and the nineteenth century foundations of determinism", I argue that an example of indeterminism in classical physics which has attracted attention in philosophy of physics in recent years, namely the Norton come, was already discussed during the nineteenth century. However, the significance which this type of indeterminism had back then is very different from the significance which the Norton dome currently has in philosophy of physics. This is explained by the fact that determinism was conceived of in an essentially different way: in particular, the nineteenth century authors who wrote about this type of indeterminism regarded determinism as an a priori principle rather than as a property of the equations of physics. In "Vital instability: life and free will in physics and physiology, 1860-1880", I show how Maxwell, Cournot, Stewart and Boussinesq used the possibility of unstable or indeterministic mechanical systems to argue that the will or a vital principle can intervene in organic processes without violating the laws of physics, so that a strictly dualist account of life and the mind is possible. Moreover, I show that their ideas can be understood as a reaction to the law of conservation of energy and to the way it was used in physiology to exclude vital and mental causes. In "The nineteenth century conflict between mechanism and irreversibility", I show that in the late nineteenth century, there was a widespread conflict between the aim of reducing physical processes to mechanics and the recognition that certain processes are irreversible. Whereas the so-called reversibility objection is known as an objection that was made to the kinetic theory of gases, it in fact appeared in a wide range of arguments, and was susceptible to very different interpretations. It was only when the project of reducing all of physics to mechanics lost favor, in the late nineteenth century, that the reversibility objection came to be used as an argument against mechanism and against the kinetic theory of gases. In "Continuity in nature and in mathematics: Boltzmann and Poincaré", I show that the development of rigorous foundations of differential calculus in the nineteenth century led to concerns about its applicability in physics: through this development, differential calculus was made independent of empirical and intuitive notions of continuity and was instead based on mathematical continuity conditions, and for Boltzmann and Poincaré, the applicability of differential calculus in physics depended on whether these continuity conditions could be given a foundation in intuition or experience. In the final paper, "Determinism around 1900", I briefly discuss the implications of the developments described in the previous two papers for the history of determinism in physics, through a discussion of determinism in Mach, Poincaré and Boltzmann. I show that neither of them regards determinism as a property of the laws of mechanics; rather, for them, determinism is a precondition for science, which can be verified to the extent that science is successful. (shrink)

Quantum indeterminism may make available the option of an interactionism that does not have to pay the price of a force over and above those forces that are acknowledged in physics in order to explain how intentions can be physically effective. I show how this option might work in concrete terms and offer a criticism of it.