Gallagher, S. 2008. Self-agency and mental causality. In J. Parnas and Kenneth S. Kendler (eds.), Philosophical issues in psychiatry: Natural kinds, mental taxonomy and the nature of reality (288-312). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter 7 Self-agency and Mental Causality Shaun Gallagher, Ph.D. In this chapter, I explore one small corner of the concept of mental causality and how it relates to questions about free will and agency. It's the corner where discussions about mind-body interactions and epiphenomenalism take place. My basic contention is that these discussions are framed in the wrong terms because they are infected by a certain conception of action that defines the question of mental causality in a classic or standard way. The standard way of asking the question is this: How does a mental event cause my body to do what it does? Setting the question in this way has consequences for ongoing interdisciplinary (psychological, neuroscientific, and philosophical) discussions of mental causation, as well as for the concepts of free will and agency. These concepts, in turn, have much to do with our understanding of what goes wrong in certain instances of psychopathology. Let me begin by setting the historical scene of what I am calling this standard way of understanding the problem of mental causality. 1. The Standard Approach to Mental Causation The epiphenomenalist position explicated by Shadworth Holloway Hodgson in 1870 states that the presence of consciousness does not matter in regard to action because it plays no causal role; neural events form an autonomous causal chain that is independent of any accompanying conscious mental states. 1 Hodgson thus denies mental causation. William James calls this a decisive step and summarizes Hodgson's position as follows: "Feelings, no matter how intensely they may be present, can have