Confronting the Issue of "Mental Causation" from the Viewpoint of Ṣadr al-Muta’llihīn

The issue of mental causation seeks to explain how the mind and body act and react to each other. Any efficient theory in the philosophy of mind must have the capacity to answer the question of mental causation. The weakness of dualism in providing a correct explanation for this problem prompted the physicalists to put aside the immaterial mind and in this way seek to solve this problem. However, the philosophers of mind, like the dualists, have not been able to give a suitable answer to this problem. Mullā Ṣadrā considers the problem of both groups to be lack of a comprehensive view of the soul, and by properly delineating the whole truth of the soul and how it emerges from the body, he provides an appropriate answer to the problems of double determination, pseudo-phenomenology, the problem of exclusion, the problem of necessity for contact, the problem of coupling, and downward causality reasoning.