E. J. Lowe, Personal Agency: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action . Reviewed by (original) (raw)
Related papers
Noûs, 1997
Some actions are "overt": they essentially involve agents' moving their bodies. Others are not: there are mental actions-for example, solving a chess problem in one's head, or deliberating about whether to accept a job offer. According to a popular view, actions are, essentially, events with a suitable causal history, a causal history featuring pertinent mental events or states. This view, if it is correct, helps both with a metaphysical issue and with an explanatory issue in the philosophy of mind. The metaphysical issue is how actions differ from nonactions. The explanatory issue is how actions are to be explained. On one popular view, they are to be explained-causally-partly in terms of such things as beliefs, desires, intentions, and associated mental events (e.g., acquiring an intention to A now). If actions essentially have such items as causes, this view of action-explanation has metaphysical underpinnings.
My paper provides a preliminary work towards a theory of freedom and agency which I name "Theory of Procedural Agency (TPA)". Since TPA relies on intuitions which can not be settled into the metaphysical framework of contemporary approaches to freedom and agency, I focus on some reasons which explain why these intuitions should be preferred to the competing ones. My strategy is to argue for my view defending an embryonal version of TPA, that is Berkeley's considerations on free will, agency and determinism. In the first section I deal with Berkeley's treatment of free will. My idea is that his arguments offer clear and evident reasons in support of the first intuition grounding a TPA like approach to freedom. In the second section I move some criticisms to Berkeley's theory of will, claiming that, in order to overcome these, the assumption of the constitution view concerning self-knowledge would help. In the third section I set forth a logical formulation for TPA, showing how Berkeley's considerations on agency provide grounding reasons for that. Finally, in the last section, I plan the work to be done to achieve a consistent and complete version of TPA.
The Natural Philosophy of Agency
Philosophy Compass, 2007
A review of several theories and brain-imaging experiments shows that there is no consensus about how to define the sense of agency. In some cases the sense of agency is construed in terms of bodily movement or motor control, in others it is linked to the intentional aspect of action. For some theorists it is the product of higher-order cognitive processes, for others it is a feature of first-order phenomenal experience. In this paper I propose a multiple aspects account of the sense of agency.
The moot point of the Western philosophical rhetoric about free will consists in examining whether the claim of authorship to intentional, deliberative actions fits into or is undermined by a one-way causal framework of determinism. Philosophers who think that reconciliation between the two is possible are known as metaphysical compatibilists. However, there are philosophers populating the other end of the spectrum, known as the metaphysical libertarians, who maintain that claim to intentional agency cannot be sustained unless it is assumed thatindeterministic causal processes pervade the action-implementation apparatus employed by the agent. The metaphysical libertarians differ among themselves on the question of whether the indeterministic causal relation exists between the series of intentional states and processes, both conscious and unconscious, and the action, making claim for what has come to be known as the event-causal view, or between the agent and the action, arguing that a sort of agent causation is at work. In this paper, I have tried to propose that certain features of both event-causal and agent-causal libertarian views need to be combined in order to provide a more defendable compatibilist account accommodating deliberative actions with deterministic causation. The ‘‘agent-executed-eventcausal libertarianism’’, the account of agency I have tried to develop here, integrates certain plausible features of the two competing accounts of libertarianism turning them into a consistent whole. I hope to show in the process that the integration of these two variants of libertarianism does not challenge what some accounts of metaphysical compatibilism propose—that there exists a broader deterministic relation between the web of mental and extra-mental components constituting the agent’s dispositional system—the agent’s beliefs, desires, short-term and long-term goals based on them, the acquired social, cultural and religious beliefs, the general and immediate and situational environment in which the agent is placed, etc. on the one hand and the decisions she makes over her lifetime on the basis of these factors. While in the ‘‘Introduction’’ the philosophically assumed anomaly between deterministic causation and the intentional act of deciding has been briefly surveyed, the second section is devoted to the task of bridging the gap between compatibilism and libertarianism. The next section of the paper turns to an analysis of folk-psychological concepts and intuitions about the effects of neurochemical processes and prior mental events on the freedom of making choices. How philosophical insights can be beneficially informed by taking into consideration folk-psychological intuitions has also been discussed, thus setting up the background for such analysis. It has been suggested in the end that support for the proposed theory of intentional agency can be found in the folk-psychological intuitions, when they are taken in the right perspective.
Critical notice of Helen Steward's 'A Metaphysics for Freedom', published in the Philosophical Quarterly
O'Connor, Timothy. Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will
Review of Metaphysics, 2003
excellent book contributes to the debate about freedom in analytic philosophy. While O'Connor does not make matters easy for the reader, often sacrificing clarity for conciseness, he presents an ingenious defense of agent causation. On O'Connor's model, free actions are caused by intentions, which are themselves produced not by other states or events but instead by the agent herself. The agent stands at the beginning of this causal chain in the sense that she is not caused to cause her intentions.