The Ontology of E. J. Lowe’s Substance Dualism

E. J. Lowe’s model of psychophysical causation offers a way of reconciling interactive substance dualism with the causal completeness principle by denying the homogeneity of the causal relata—more specifically, by invoking a distinction between ‘fact causation’ and ‘event causation’. According to Lowe, purely physical causation is event causation, whereas psychophysical causation involves fact causation, allowing the dualist to accept a version of causal completeness which holds that all physical events have only physical causes. But Lowe’s dualist model is only as plausible as the distinction between fact and event causation upon which it rests. In this chapter it is argued that a suitable distinction between fact and event causation is difficult to maintain within most common ontological systems. It is examined whether accepting the four-category ontology that Lowe defends can alleviate the problem, but it is argued that it is not clear that it can.