Abstract

Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism has been repeatedly criticized since its initial defense in the paper Mental Events, which was published in 1970. Despite the widespread rejection, there seems to be no agreement on why anomalous monism fails. This paper systematizes two strong objections to anomalous monism. First, Davidson’s argument for monism requires the problematic assumption that physics can provide strict causal laws for causal relations in general. Second, Davidson’s monism requires an ontology of events for which no satisfactory criterion of identity has been provided. Despite these problems, the paper argues that the theses on the anomalism and irreducibility of the mental remain acceptable, despite the difficulty of reconstructing precisely the arguments Davidson uses to defend them.