The Exclusion Argument, which aims to deny the causal efficacy of irreducible mental properties, is probably the most serious threat to non-reductive physicalism. Many non-reductivist responses can only reject simplified versions of the exclusion argument, but fail to refute a sophisticated version. In this paper, I attempt to show that we can block the sophisticated exclusion argument by appeal to a sophisticated understanding of causation, what I call the ‘Dual-condition Conception of Causation’. Specifically, I argue that the dual-condition account of causation motivates an Autonomy approach to solving the exclusion problem (whereas this account of causation challenges the Overdetermination approach). According to the autonomy solution, even if mental properties are unable to cause fundamental physical properties, they can still cause higher-level properties (such as mental, behavioral, and social properties)—if so, human agency would be preserved in the physical world.

In recent years the idea that perceptual content is tensed in the sense that we can perceive objects as present or as past has come under attack. In this paper the notion of tensed content is to the contrary defended. The paper argues that assuming that something like an intentionalistic theory of perception is correct, it is very reasonable to suppose that perceptual content is tensed, and that a denial of this notion requires a denial of some intuitively very plausible principles. The paper discusses some common objections against the notion of tensed content and concludes that none of them succeeds in showing that perceptual content cannot be tensed.

The main argument given for relevant alternatives theories of knowledge has been that they answer scepticism about the external world. I will argue that relevant alternatives also solve two other problems that have been much discussed in recent years, a) the bootstrapping problem and b) the apparent conflict between semantic externalism and armchair self-knowledge. Furthermore, I will argue that scepticism and Mooreanism can be embedded within the relevant alternatives framework.