New Waves in Philosophy of Action

by Aguilar, Jess; Buckareff, Andrei A.; Frankish, Keith

• ISBN13: 9780230230606
• ISBN10: 0230230601
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-12-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This volume contains a set of state-of-the-art essays by younger philosophers on various topics in the philosophy of action. Some of the essays are about the metaphysics of action and agency; some consider the nature of autonomy and free agency; some explore conceptual and normative issues, some draw on data from psychology and psychopathology. But what all of them have in common is that they address some problem related to our existence as human agents. The range of topics covered is this collection is broad. This is intentional. Rather than focus on one narrow topic in the philosophy of action, this volume brings together papers that, taken together, introduce readers to some key debates in contemporary philosophy of action. Readers new to the field should come away from the volume with a good sense of the state-of-the-art with respect to current thinking about human action and agency. For their part, established researchers in the field will find the essays to be original contributions that substantially advance many debates about action and agency.

Author Biography

Jess H. Aguilar is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, USA Andrei A. Buckareff is Assistant Professor at Marist College, USA Keith Frankish is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at The Open University, UK

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. vii
Series Editors' Preface	p. viii
Notes on Contributors	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Foundations of Action and Agency	p. 11
Agency, Ownership, and the Standard Theory	p. 13
Failing to Do the Impossible	p. 32
Experimental Philosophy of Action	p. 50
Autonomy	p. 79
Identification, Psychology, and Habits	p. 81
Mass Perverse Identification: An Argument for a Modest Concept of Autonomy	p. 98
Cartesian Reflections on the Autonomy of the Mental	p. 122
Free Agency	p. 141
The Revisionist Turn: A Brief History of Recent Work on Free Will	p. 143
Luck and Free Will	p. 173
Experimental Philosophy on Free Will: An Error Theory for Incompatibilist Intuitions	p. 189
Action and Agency in Context	p. 217
Agentive Experience as Pushmi-Pullyu Representations	p. 219
Double Bookkeepping in Delusions: Explaining the Gap between Saying and Doing	p. 237
The Limits of Rationality in Collective Action Explanations	p. 257
Index	p. 274
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