Five Questions on the Philosophy of Actions: Some Replies (original) (raw)
Related papers
Five Questions on Philosophy of Action
In terms of my own first-personal narrative, the most obvious proximal cause of my theorizing about agency was a graduate seminar on free will taught by Peter van Inwagen. It was my first semester of graduate school, and van Inwagen's forceful presentation of incompatibilism made a big impression on me. I left that course thinking incompatibilism was both obvious and irrefutable. The only problem was that I didn't stay at Notre Dame. I transferred to Stanford in the following year, where I discovered the truth of a remark John Fischer once ...
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.
Does Philosophy of Action Rest on a Mistake?
Metaphilosophy, 2001
Philosophers of action tend to take for granted the concept of basic actions-actions that are done at will, or directly-as opposed to others that are performed in other ways. This concept does foundational work in action theory; many theorists, especially causalists, take part of their task to be showing that normal, complex actions necessarily stem from basic ones somehow. The case for the concept of basic actions is driven by a family of observations and a cluster of closely related anti-infinite regress arguments. I review this case in the work of Arthur Danto, Donald Davidson, and Jennifer Hornsby-three of the most important developers of the concept-and find it lacking. I conclude by sketching the possibility of non-foundationalist action theory.
Two Dogmas of Contemporary Philosophy of Action
Davidson’s seminal essay “Actions, Reasons and Causes” brought about a paradigm shift in the philosophy of action. Before Davidson the consensus was that the fundamental task of the philosophy of action was to elucidate the concept of action and the concept of event. After Davidson it has been assumed that the fundamental challenge for the philosophy of action is to answer not the conceptual question “what does it mean to explain something as an action?”, but a metaphysical question, namely, “how is causal over-determination by the mental and the physical possible?” I argue that the two main considerations Davidson provides for construing the question posed by the action/event distinction in metaphysical rather than conceptual terms are inconclusive. To the extent that Davidson’s essay was responsible for this paradigm shift, contemporary philosophy of action may well be said to rest on two unexamined dogmas.
The Action-Theoretic Basis of Practical Philosophy
2007
In the philosophical tradition ever since Aristotle theory of action has been regarded as an essential and indispensable basis of the core disciplines of practical philosophy, which should explain, among others, how prudential rationality, moral behaviour, responsibility, freedom or autonomy are possible. We find such explicit action theory underpinnings of their respective ethics or theories of rationality in Aristotle, in Epicurus, in Stoic philosophy or later, in modern times in Locke, in Hume or, to a minor degree, in Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer to name only a few.
Essentially Intentional Actions and Naive Action Theory
The existence of essentially intentional actions has been recently challenged by some philosophers of action. In my paper, I will use Michael Thompson’s naive action theory to argue for the view that essentially intentional actions exist, or naive essentialism. My paper has four parts. First, I present some key features of naive action theory and the broader Anscombean tradition of action theory. One central feature is the concept of “naive rationalization”, which states actions can be explained by other actions in virtue of a grounding relationship between parts and wholes. More specifically, an action p can be explained by being seen as a metaphysically dependent “sub-action” of a larger intentional action q. For example, an action of “egg-mixing” can be explained by being seen as a part of a larger action of “omelet-making”. Second, I utilize the aforementioned key concepts of naive action theory to distinguish between essentially and accidentally intentional actions. Essentially intentional actions are intentional in themselves as opposed to being intentional in virtue of some other action, and are thereby never sub-actions. Accidentally intentional actions are intentional in virtue of something else, and are thereby always sub-actions. Third, I provide the Grounding Argument for the existence of essentially intentional actions. In broad strokes, the argument demonstrates that given accidentally intentional actions are always dependent on some other action in order to be intentional, essentially intentional actions must exist to serve as the terminus of such chains of dependence. Lastly, I will briefly respond to a possible objection to my argument. The significance of my paper is that it expands upon naive action theory, demonstrates the existence of essentially intentional actions, and illuminates the asymmetrical metaphysical and explanatory relationship between distinct kinds of action.
Action without Agency and Natural Human Action: Resolving a Double Paradox
The Philosophical Challenge from China, 2015
In the philosophy of action, it is generally understood that action presupposes an agent performing or guiding the action. Action is also generally understood as distinct form the kind of motion that happens in nature. Together these common perspectives on action rule out both action without agency and natural action. And yet, there are times when action can seem qualitatively both natural and lacking a sense of agency. Recently, David Velleman, referring to work by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Zhuangzi, has considered the possibility of agency without agency. In this chapter, I build on Velleman's work and posit the notion of self-organization (which in the natural sciences serves as the basis for many familiar kinds of motion in nature) to also serve as the basis for human behavior. If action is a variety of behavior, conceiving of human behavior as fundamentally an instance of self-organization unifies human action with nature from the beginning and allows us to conceptualize the possibility of human action without presupposing the necessity of agency. I go on to entertain three types of human behavior in which the sense of agency is significantly absent and which progressively qualify as action.
Discussion � Velleman on Action and Agency
Philosophical Studies, 2005
's work on agency is consistently creative and provocative. The essays that compose The Possibility of Practical Reason all bear these marks. One of Velleman's aims is to replace a familiar causal approach to analyzing and explaining action-''the standard model'' (p. 4) or ''the standard story'' (p. 123)-with his own causal view. In Chapter 1, he asserts that ''The claim made for the standard model is that it is a model of action, in which my capacity to make things happen is exercised to its fullest extent'' (p. 4). This assertion misrepresents the model, I have argued (Mele, 2003, Chapter 10). In his description of it in Chapters 1 and 6, Velleman apparently has in mind the kind of thing visible in work of causalists seeking what is common to all (overt) intentional actions, or all (overt) actions done for reasons, and for what distinguishes actions of these broad kinds from everything else. ''Human action par excellence'' or ''full-blooded human action'' (Velleman, Chapter 6) may be intentional action, or action done for a reason, in virtue of its having the properties identified in relatively standard causal analyses of these things. That the analyses do not provide sufficient conditions for, or a story about, ''full-blooded'' action is not a flaw in them, given their broad targets. And, of course, causalists have offered accounts of kinds of action-for example, free action and action exhibiting a kind self-control that is the contrary of akrasia (see, e.g., Fischer, 1994; Mele, 1995)-that exceed minimal requirements for intentional action or action done for a reason. Their story about minimally sufficient conditions for action of the latter kinds certainly is not their entire story about human actions. My focus here is a related topic, Velleman's positive work on what distinguishes actions from nonactions and, accordingly, agents from nonagents.
AN EXAMINATION OF ROBERT KANE'S PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION
2021
Over the years, there has been the contention among some philosophers on the nature of an action. Some argue that for an action to occur, there must be some certain mental dispositions such as willing, volition and the engagement of the mind, in connection with responsibility. As it were, action theory takes care of issues like; freewill, motive, intention, etc., which are of course littered in the writings of Kane. In this light, Kane sustains that an action that responsibility should be accorded is that action that was done with the will of an agent, who is a rational being. This work highlight the ideas of Kane as it refers to action theory themes found therein and thus places him in a particular classification of Action Theories highlighted in philosophy.