A Causal Account of the Physical

Abstract Physicalism is often characterized by the slogan that “There is nothing over and above the physical.” Thus, making physicalism precise requires making “the physical” precise. In this paper I advance one such way of making the physical precise and in doing so defend a new approach to defining the physical. I argue that a property is physical iff it belongs to the largest strong-component of a causal network that includes exemplary physical properties. This avoids the triviality-problem faced by physics-based accounts and withstands an important argument against accounts that are not physics-based.