Trying Without Willing
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Action Reconceptualized
Author: David K. Chan
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Release Date: 2016-05-11
The concept of action that requires philosophical analysis is one that concerns behavior characteristically found in humans. In Action Reconceptualized: Human Agency and Its Sources, David K. Chan examines the sources of human agency that are proposed in causal theories of action—namely desire, intention, and trying—and distinguishes them from each other in terms of their roles in practical reasoning and motivation. He conceptualizes them in relation to each other in a way that is consistent and useful for answering a number of questions that are central to the philosophy of action. The action theory in this book addresses the need to understand human agency for its own sake, but it also serves another purpose. When the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe stressed the need to do philosophy of action before doing ethical theory, what she meant was that moral philosophers should first work out a proper account of the relationship between the inner states of a person and the actions that she performs. This book provides such an account, and makes the case that it is desire, rather than intention, that is the basis for the ethical evaluation of an agent. Action Reconceptualized will be of particular interest to students and scholars doing research in action theory and ethics, as well as to those working outside of philosophy in psychology and cognitive science.
Causing Actions
Author: Paul M. Pietroski
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Release Date: 2002
Thoughts often cause deeds. Actions are done for reasons. But do actions and their mental causes also have descriptions that do not involve reasons? Various considerations can make it seem that human mental events must be biochemical events. Paul Pietroski, however, defends a non-Cartesian form of dualism. Actions and their rationalizing causes belong to an autonomous mental domain-although this autonomy is compatible with the supervenience of the mental on the non-mental. On this view, some bodily motions have rationalizing causes distinct from any biochemical causes; Pietroski argues that this is not an objectionable form of overdetermination. Central to his account is his proposed treatment of ceteris paribus laws, their role in explanation, and how such laws are related to singular causal claims. Pietroski also connects these issues to semantic questions arising from discussions of action reports and belief ascriptions. All philosophers interested in mind or causation will be intrigued by his new theory.
Embodied Minds in Action
In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied. This entails that our minds are necessarily spread throughout our living, organismic bodies and belong to their complete neurobiological constitution. So minds like ours are necessarily alive. The second claim is that essentially embodied minds are self-organizing thermodynamic systems. This entails that our mental lives consist in the possibility and actuality of moving our own living organismic bodies through space and time, by means of our conscious desires. The upshot is that we are essentially minded animals who help to create the natural world through our own agency. This doctrine—the Essential Embodiment Theory—is a truly radical idea which subverts the traditionally opposed and seemingly exhaustive categories of Dualism and Materialism, and offers a new paradigm for contemporary mainstream research in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience.