Mental Causation versus Physical Causation: No Contest

Common sense supposes thoughts can cause bodily movements and thereby cause changes in where the agent is or how his surroundings are. Many philosophers suppose that any such outcome is realized in a complex state of affairs involving only microparticles; that previous microphysical developments were sufficient to cause that state of affairs; hence that, barring overdetermination, causation by the mental is excluded. This paper argues that the microphysical swarm that realizes the outcome is an accident (Aristotle) or a coincidence (David Owens) and has no cause, though each component movement in it has one. Mental causation faces no competition "from below".

Rough Waters: Life at Sea in the 19th Century

This talk consists of two parts - first part deals with what Jeffrey Bolster called “The Changing Nature of Maritime Insurrection”- and I will tie that into some research that I did on a New York clipper ship called the Contest. The second part of the talk will look at the rise of seafarer’s missions and that will tie Roald Kverndal’s magnum opus Seamen’s Missions: Their Origin and Early Growth into some research that I did on the earliest work done in New York among seafarers that pre-dated the American Seamen’s Friend Society.