Abstract
I started this book with a quote by Peter Machamer et al. (2000). They posited that without thinking about mechanisms we cannot understand the life sciences: we can neither reveal their ontological commitments, nor handle the various philosophical problems arising in that scientific context. In this book I have argued that one cannot understand the new mechanistic approach without thinking about the metaphysics of mechanisms. In this chapter, I summarize the conclusions of the book and thereby provide a summary of the metaphysical theory of mechanisms developed. Furthermore, I discuss the question whether the resulting approach can be used to argue for anti-reductionism with regard to higher-level sciences and the mind, and I highlight a few differences between the new mechanistic thinking and more traditional law-based approaches to the metaphysics of explanation in order to show that the new mechanistic approach indeed provides new perspectives on the metaphysics of the life sciences.
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- 1.
Is the realm of lower-level mechanisms causally closed? For the sake of argument, I ignore this question here. Since I want to evaluate whether the new mechanistic approach suggests a view in line with non-reductive physicalism, and non-reductive physicalists usually accept premise 3, I just assume that we can somehow make sense of the claim that the mechanistic realm is causally closed.
References
Bechtel, W. (2007). Reducing psychology while maintaining its autonomy via mechanistic explanations. In M. Schouten & H. Looren de Jong (Eds.), The matter of the mind: Philosophical essays on psychology, neuroscience and reduction (pp. 172–198). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004.
Craver, C. F. (2007). Explaining the brain: Mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press.
Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67, 1–25.
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Krickel, B. (2018). Autonomy, Laws of Nature, and the Mind–Body Problem. In: The Mechanical World. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03629-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03629-4_8
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