The Harvard Brief

John Campbell, "Causation in Psychology" (Harvard UP, 2020)


Listen Later

Our practices of holding people morally and legally responsible for what they do rests on causal relationships between our mental states and our actions – a desire for revenge or a fear for one’s safety may cause a violent act. In either case, John Campbell argues, there is a psychological causal process that leads from the motivating mental state to the action. In Causation in Psychology (Harvard University Press, 2020), Campbell – who is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, claims that the existence of such singular causal relations and our knowledge of them do not depend on the existence of psychological generalizations under which they might be subsumed. Moreover, imaginative understanding or empathy enables us to trace these one-off, idiosyncratic causal sequences and thereby attain knowledge of these singular psychological causal relations. Campbell uses his analysis to distinguish human freedom of action at the level of causal process and to provide a new perspective on the traditional mind-body problem.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

The Harvard BriefBy New Books Network

  • 3.5
  • 3.5
  • 3.5
  • 3.5
  • 3.5

3.5

2 ratings


More shows like The Harvard Brief

View all
The New Yorker Radio Hour by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

The New Yorker Radio Hour

6,949 Listeners

On the Media by WNYC Studios

On the Media

9,223 Listeners

New Books in Critical Theory by Marshall Poe

New Books in Critical Theory

148 Listeners

The Daily by The New York Times

The Daily

113,129 Listeners

Know Your Enemy by Matthew Sitman

Know Your Enemy

2,077 Listeners

If Books Could Kill by Michael Hobbes & Peter Shamshiri

If Books Could Kill

9,420 Listeners

American Campus Podcast by Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

American Campus Podcast

21 Listeners