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Summary Identification theories hold that free acts are actions caused by states of the agent with which she identifies. Identification may be cognitive: an agent may be said to identify with a state if she has the right beliefs (or lacks the wrong beliefs) with regard to it. Alternatively, identification may be a matter of wanting that the state in question produce action. Identification theories are usually compatibilist theories, motivated by the thought that what matters for freedom is not whether one's mental states are caused by processes over which the agent, ultimately, lacks control, but whether the agent is satisfied with the states which cause their actions. Identification theories have been extremely influential as accounts of autonomy, as well as freedom.
Key works The major landmark in this terrain is undoubtedly Frankfurt 1971. In this influential article, Frankfurt argued that a free action is caused by a first-order desire which the agent wants to be their will. In later work, Frankfurt has developed and modified this view to avoid objections, and in the process proposed somewhat different accounts of identification; see Frankfurt 1988Watson 1975 develops a rival account of what identification consists in which has also been influential: for him, we identify with actions if they are in accordance with our values. Watson 1987 rejects this account as a necessary condition of free will. Bratman 2007 has developed an account of agency that builds on the insights of identification theories: for him, it is the mesh between our actions and our plans and intentions that is important.
Introductions Buss 2008
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107 found
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  1. Autonomy as Practical Understanding.Reza Hadisi - forthcoming - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy.
    In this paper, I offer a theory of autonomous agency that relies on the re-sources of a strongly cognitivist theory of intention and intentional action. On the proposed account, intentional action is a graded notion that is ex-plained via the agent’s degree of practical knowledge. In turn, autonomous agency is also a graded notion that is explained via the agent’s degree of practical understanding. The resulting theory can synthesize insights from both the hierarchical and the cognitivist theories of autonomy with (...)
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  2. The Disappearing Agent as an Exclusion Problem.Johannes Himmelreich - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The disappearing agent problem is an argument in the metaphysics of agency. Proponents of the agent-causal approach argue that the rival event-causal approach fails to account for the fact that an agent is active. This paper examines an analogy between this disappearing agent problem and the exclusion problem in the metaphysics of mind. I develop the analogy between these two problems and survey existing solutions. I suggest that some solutions that have received significant attention in response to the exclusion problem (...)
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  3. The importance of self‐knowledge for free action.Joseph Gurrola - 2023 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (4):996-1013.
    Much has been made about the ways that implicit biases and other apparently unreflective attitudes can affect our actions and judgments in ways that negatively affect our ability to do right. What has been discussed less is that these attitudes negatively affect our freedom. In this paper, I argue that implicit biases pose a problem for free will. My analysis focuses on the compatibilist notion of free will according to which acting freely consists in acting in accordance with our reflectively (...)
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  4. The Status of Video Games as Self-Involving Interactive Fictions: Fuzzy Intervals and Hard Identifications.Kristina Šekrst - 2023 - Sic: Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation 3.
    The goal of this paper is to see how mental and language representations are unique from a video-game perspective, using two main criteria. First, I will posit that the level of being both an interactive work of fiction and a self-involving interactive fiction belongs to a fuzzy interval and that some works – and, therefore, some video games – are more immersive than others. Second, I will observe how propositions tie the player’s representations of the real world and the game (...)
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  5. Agency: Let's Mind What's Fundamental.Robert H. Wallace - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):285–298.
    The standard event-causal theory of action says that an intentional action is caused in the right way by the right mental states. This view requires reductionism about agency. The causal role of the agent must be nothing over and above the causal contribution of the relevant mental event-causal processes. But commonsense finds this reductive solution to the “agent-mind problem”, the problem of explaining the relationship between agents and the mind, incredible. Where did the agent go? This paper suggests that this (...)
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  6. Becoming 'Realistic' about Reality.Ilexa Yardley - 2023 - Https://Medium.Com/the-Circular-Theory/.
    Conservation of the Circle is the only dynamic in Nature. Forget about physics, philosophy, psychology, technology, biology, finance, politics, and the media (the concrete abstraction) (the constant variable). Language cannot provide anywhere near a 'complete' articulation (understanding) of (what humans experience as) 'Reality.'.
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  7. “It was all a cruel angel’s thesis from the start”: Folk intuitions about Zygote cases do not support the Zygote argument.Florian Cova - 2022 - In Thomas Nadelhoffer & Andrew Monroe (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Free Will and Responsibility. Advances in Experimental Philo.
    Manipulation arguments that start from the intuition that manipulated agents are neither free nor morally responsible then conclude to that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism. The Zygote argument is a special case of Manipulation argument in which the manipulation intervenes at the very conception of the agent. In this paper, I argue that the Zygote argument fails because (i) very few people share the basic intuitions the argument rests on, and (ii) even those who share this (...)
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  8. Su Max Scheler. Riflessioni a partire da Wesen und Formen der Sympathie.Elia Gonnella - 2022 - Dialegesthai. Rivista Telematica di Filosofia 24.
  9. Demystifying the Deep Self View.August Gorman - 2022 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 19 (4):390-414.
    Deep Self views of moral responsibility have been criticized for positing mysterious concepts, making nearly paradoxical claims about the ownership of one’s mental states, and promoting self-deceptive moral evasion. I defend Deep Self views from these pervasive forms of skepticism by arguing that some criticism is hasty and stems from epistemic injustice regarding testimonies of experiences of alienation, while other criticism targets contingent features of Deep Self views that ought to be abandoned. To aid in this project, I provide original (...)
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  10. Sometimes I Am Fictional: Narrative and Identification.Alfonso Muñoz-Corcuera - 2022 - Philosophical Papers 51 (3):403-425.
    Most analytical philosophers consider that we cannot identify with fictional characters in a literal sense. Specifically, Carroll and Gaut argue that doing so would imply a high degree of irrationality. In this paper I stand for the claim that we can identify with fictional characters thanks to a suspension of disbelief. First, I rely on narrative theories of personal identity to propose a model of how the process of identification might happen in real life. Then, I explain how this model (...)
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  11. Euclid's Error: The Mathematics behind Foucault, Deleuze, and Nietzsche.Ilexa Yardley - 2021 - Https://Medium.Com/the-Circular-Theory/.
    We have to go all the way back to Euclid, and, actually, before, to figure out the basis for representation, and therefore, interpretation. Which is, pure and simple, the conservation of a circle. As articulated by Foucault, Deleuze, and Nietzsche. 'Pi' (in mathematics) is the background state for everything (a.k.a. 'mind').Providing the explanation for (and the current popularity, and, thus, the 'genius' behind) NFT (non fungible tokens). 'Reality' has, finally, caught up with the 'truth.'.
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  12. Depression’s Threat to Self-Governance.August Gorman - 2020 - Social Theory and Practice 46 (2):277-297.
    Much of the literature on impairment to self-governance focuses on cases in which a person either lacks the ability to protect herself from errant urges or cases in which a person lacks the capacity to initiate self-reflective agential processes. This has led to frameworks for thinking about self-governance designed with only the possibility of these sorts of impairments in mind. I challenge this orthodoxy using the case of melancholic depression to show that there is a third way that self-governance can (...)
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  13. Two Problems for the Constitution View of Omissions: A Reply to Palmer.Jonathan D. Payton - 2020 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):1447-1455.
    Palmer defends the ‘Constitution View’ of omissions. According to this view, every omission is constituted by, though not identical to, some positive event. I argue that Palmer’s version of this view can’t do all the work he wants it to do. First, it can’t provide an answer to the ontological question to which he addresses himself: ‘What kind of thing is an omission?’ Second, it doesn’t give us the resources to determine which positive events serve as the ultimate constituters of (...)
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  14. Emily Thomas (red.): Early Modern Women on Metaphysics.Oda K. S. Davanger - 2018 - Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift 53 (2-3):171-175.
    På mange måter er dette en bok som blir utgitt alt for sent. Det er den første antologien av sitt slag, og retter fokus på kvinnelige metafysikere som virket i den tidlige moderne perioden (16. og tidlig 17. århundre). Redaktør Emily Thomas skriver i introduksjonen at til tross for at flere antologier om moderne metafysikk allerede finnes, er kvinnelige filosofer fortsatt underrepresentert og den filosofiske kanon mannsdominert. De ni filosofene som blir omtalt i totalt 13 kapitler var alle originale og (...)
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  15. Identification and Self-Knowledge.Luca Malatesti & Filip Čeč - 2018 - In Julie Kirsch Patrizia Pedrini (ed.), Third-Person Self-Knowledge, Self-Interpretation, and Narrative. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 177-189.
    Recently, Matt King and Peter Carruthers have argued that the Real Self accounts of moral responsibility or autonomy are under pressure because they rely on a questionable conception of self-knowledge of propositional attitudes, such as beliefs and desires. In fact, they defend, as a plausible assumption, the claim that transparent self-knowledge of propositional attitudes is incompatible with mounting evidence in the cognitive sciences. In this chapter, we respond to this line of argument. We describe the types of self-knowledge that might (...)
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  16. Psychopathy, Identification and Mental Time Travel.Luca Malatesti & Filip Čeč - 2018 - In Filip Grgic & Davor Pećnjak (eds.), Free Will and Action. Dordrecht: pp. 89-101.
    Recently some have argued that psychopaths might suffer generalised cognitive impairments that affect their capacity for mental time travel. In relation to the past, mental time travel is the capacity to have memories of past episodes in which the agent was personally involved. In relation to the future, mental time travel involves prospection, the capacity to imagine future situations where the agent might be involved. The authors argue that certain studies on the instrumental learning of psychopaths show that, in relation (...)
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  17. Why value values?Murray Samuel - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41.
    Doris argues that an agent is responsible for her behavior only if that behavior expresses (a relevant subset of) the agent’s values. This view has problems explaining responsibility for mistakes or episodes of forgetfulness. These problems highlight a conceptual problem with Doris’s theory of responsible agency and give us reasons to prefer an alternative (non-valuational) theory of responsible agency.
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  18. The Vague Time of a Killing.Kenneth Silver - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (6):1383-1400.
    The problem of the time of a killing concerns exactly when and where to locate our actions. It is a problem for many of our actions beyond killing, and there are versions of the problem that can be raised no matter where your theory locates actions in particular. To answer the problem, I claim that we should be guided to the referent of ‘the killing’ by examining the definition of ‘to kill.’ Once we have the correct definition, we can see (...)
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  19. Bratman on identity over time and identification at a time.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2017 - Philosophical Explorations 20 (1):1-14.
    According to reductionists about agency, an agent’s bringing something about is reducible to states and events involving the agent bringing something about. Many have worried that reductionism cannot accommodate robust forms of agency, such as self-determination. One common reductionist answer to this worry contends that self-determining agents are identified with certain states and events, and so these states and events causing a decision counts as the agent’s self-determining the decision. In this paper, I discuss Michael Bratman’s well-known identification reductionist theory (...)
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  20. Cares, Identification, and Agency Reductionism.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (S1):577-598.
    Reductionists about agency maintain that an agent’s causing something is reducible to states and events involving the agent causing something. Some worry that reductionism cannot accommodate robust forms of agency, such as self-determination. One reductionist answer to this worry, which I call ‘identification reductionism,’ contends that self-governing agents are identified with certain attitudes, and so these attitudes’ causing a decision count as the agent’s self-determining the decision. I argue that a prominent species of identification reductionism developed by Harry Frankfurt, Agnieszka (...)
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  21. Agency and Inner Freedom.Michael Garnett - 2017 - Noûs 51 (1):3-23.
    This paper concerns the relationship between two questions. The first is a question about inner freedom: What is it to be rendered unfree, not by external obstacles, but by aspects of oneself? The second is a question about agency: What is it to fail at being a thing that genuinely acts, and instead to be a thing that is merely acted upon, passive in relation to its own behaviour? It is widely believed that answers to the first question must rest (...)
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  22. Frankfurt’s Unwilling and Willing Addicts.Chandra Sripada - 2017 - Mind 126 (503):781-815.
    Harry Frankfurt’s Unwilling Addict and Willing Addict cases accomplish something fairly unique: they pull apart the predictions of control-based views of moral responsibility and competing self-expression views. The addicts both lack control over their actions but differ in terms of expression of their respective selves. Frankfurt’s own view is that—in line with the predictions of self-expression views—the unwilling addict is not morally responsible for his drug-directed actions while the willing addict is. But is Frankfurt right? In this essay, I put (...)
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  23. If Anyone Should Be an Agent-Causalist, then Everyone Should Be an Agent-Causalist.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2016 - Mind 125 (500):1101-1131.
    Nearly all defences of the agent-causal theory of free will portray the theory as a distinctively libertarian one — a theory that only libertarians have reason to accept. According to what I call ‘the standard argument for the agent-causal theory of free will’, the reason to embrace agent-causal libertarianism is that libertarians can solve the problem of enhanced control only if they furnish agents with the agent-causal power. In this way it is assumed that there is only reason to accept (...)
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  24. Self-expression: a deep self theory of moral responsibility.Chandra Sripada - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (5):1203-1232.
    According to Dewey, we are responsible for our conduct because it is “ourselves objectified in action”. This idea lies at the heart of an increasingly influential deep self approach to moral responsibility. Existing formulations of deep self views have two major problems: They are often underspecified, and they tend to understand the nature of the deep self in excessively rationalistic terms. Here I propose a new deep self theory of moral responsibility called the Self-Expression account that addresses these issues. The (...)
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  25. Loving Someone in Particular.Benjamin Bagley - 2015 - Ethics 125 (2):477-507.
    People loved for their beauty and cheerfulness are not loved as irreplaceable, yet people loved for “what their souls are made of” are. Or so literary romance implies; leading philosophical accounts, however, deny the distinction, holding that reasons for love either do not exist or do not include the beloved’s distinguishing features. In this, I argue, they deny an essential species of love. To account for it while preserving the beloved’s irreplaceability, I defend a model of agency on which people (...)
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  26. Aserción, expresión y acción. Una lectura de J.L. Austin.Tomás Barrero - 2015 - Dianoia 60 (74):81-107.
    This paper offers a new interpretation of John Austin’s views both on assertion and on adverbs, as result of which an expressivist thesis concerning the semantics for action sentences is advanced. First, Austin’s analysis of assertion based on various, specific assertive forces and his remarks on adverbs are systematically connected in order to obtain assertive schemata for action sentences. Finally, those schemata are put to work as the expression of inferential commitments implicit in argumentative practices of different sorts (exculpatory, justificatory (...)
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  27. Review of Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman, edited by Manuel Vargas and Gideon Yaffe. [REVIEW]Olle Blomberg - 2015 - Journal of Social Ontology 1 (2):377-379.
  28. Self-determination, self-transformation, and the case of Jean Valjean: a problem for Velleman.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (10):2591-2598.
    According to reductionists about agency, an agent’s bringing something about is reducible to states and events involving the agent bringing something about. Many have worried that reductionism cannot accommodate robust forms of agency, such as self-determination. One common reductionist answer to this worry contends that self-determining agents are identified with certain states and events, and so these states and events causing a decision counts as the agent’s self-determining the decision. In this paper I discuss J. David Velleman’s identification reductionist theory, (...)
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  29. The Physical Action Theory of Trying.David-Hillel Ruben - 2015 - Methode 4 (6).
    Metaphysically speaking, just what is trying? There appear to be two options: to place it on the side of the mind or on the side of the world. Volitionists, who think that to try is to engage in a mental act, perhaps identical to willing and perhaps not, take the mind-side option. The second, or world-side option identifies trying to do something with one of the more basic actions by which one tries to do that thing. The trying is then (...)
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  30. Event-causal libertarianism, functional reduction, and the disappearing agent argument.Christopher Evan Franklin - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 170 (3):413-432.
    Event-causal libertarians maintain that an agent’s freely bringing about a choice is reducible to states and events involving him bringing about the choice. Agent-causal libertarians demur, arguing that free will requires that the agent be irreducibly causally involved. Derk Pereboom and Meghan Griffith have defended agent-causal libertarianism on this score, arguing that since on event-causal libertarianism an agent’s contribution to his choice is exhausted by the causal role of states and events involving him, and since these states and events leave (...)
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  31. How to Get Free Will from Positive Reinforcement.Asger Kirkeby-Hinrup - 2014 - SATS 15 (1):20-38.
    I will start by noting that Harry Frankfurt’s concept of wholeheartedness is in conflict with the intuition that free will should be efficacious in general, rather than pertain only to a small subset of decisions. To replace wholeheartedness I introduce a heuristic account for deliberation and decisions. I will show that introspective activity can lead to the individual having two types ‘introspective revelations’. By the onset of the introspective revelations a self-perpetuating loop is initiated. The loop consists of two elements (...)
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  32. The relations between agency, identification, and alienation.Alec Hinshelwood - 2013 - Philosophical Explorations 16 (3):243-258.
    This paper examines the relations between, on the one hand, accounts of the distinction between an agent's identifying with, as opposed to feeling alienated from, their attitudes; and on the other, metaphysical accounts of action. It claims that a commitment to an event-causal conception of agency, which would analyse agency in terms of the causal potency of psychological states and events, appears to render mandatory a particular style of account of identification and alienation – namely, the hierarchical model offered by (...)
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  33. Dueling Interveners: A Challenge to Frankfurt's Conception of Free Will and Acting Freely.Jason Gray - 2012 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 1 (1):56-61.
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  34. Moral Responsibility and Consciousness.Matt King & Peter Carruthers - 2012 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 9 (2):200-228.
    Our aim in this paper is to raise a question about the relationship between theories of responsibility, on the one hand, and a commitment to conscious attitudes, on the other. Our question has rarely been raised previously. Among those who believe in the reality of human freedom, compatibilists have traditionally devoted their energies to providing an account that can avoid any commitment to the falsity of determinism while successfully accommodating a range of intuitive examples. Libertarians, in contrast, have aimed to (...)
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  35. Why be yourself? Kantian respect and Frankfurtian identification.Tim Henning - 2011 - Philosophical Quarterly 61 (245):725-745.
    Harry Frankfurt has claimed that some of our desires are ‘internal’, i.e., our own in a special sense. I defend the idea that a desire's being internal matters in a normative, reasons-involving sense, and offer an explanation for this fact. The explanation is Kantian in spirit. We have reason to respect the desires of persons in so far as respecting them is a way to respect the persons who have them (in some cases, ourselves). But if desires matter normatively in (...)
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  36. Ambivalence, Valuational Inconsistency, and the Divided Self.Patricia Marino - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (1):41-71.
    Is there anything irrational, or self-undermining, about having "inconsistent" attitudes of caring or valuing? In this paper, I argue that, contra suggestions of Harry Frankfurt and Charles Taylor, the answer is "No." Here I focus on "valuations," which are endorsed desires or attitudes. The proper characterization of what I call "valuational inconsistency" I claim, involves not logical form (valuing A and not-A), but rather the co-possibility of what is valued; valuations are inconsistent when there is no possible world in which (...)
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  37. The Sense of Ability and the Phenomenology of Action.Hans Bernhard Schmid - 2011 - In Anita Konzelmann & Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), Self-Evaluation. Affective and Social Grounds of Intentionality. Springer. pp. 215-236.
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  38. Autonomy, Frankfurt, and the nature of reflective endorsement.Waheed Hussain - 2010 - Journal of Value Inquiry 44 (1):61-79.
  39. Frankfurt on Second-Order Desires and the Concept of a Person.Christopher Norris - 2010 - Prolegomena 9 (2):199-242.
    In this article I look at some the issues, problems and self-imposed dilemmas that emerge from Harry Frankfurt’s well-known essay ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’. That essay has exerted a widespread influence on subsequent thinking in ethics and philosophy of mind, especially through its central idea of ‘second-order’ desires and volitions. Frankfurt’s approach promises a third-way solution to certain longstanding issues – chiefly those of free-will versus determinism and the mind/body problem – that have up (...)
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  40. Am I Who I Say I Am? Social Identities and Identification.Nathan Placencia - 2010 - Social Theory and Practice 36 (4):643-660.
    This paper further elucidates our understanding of social identities. Some theorists have argued that we identify with our social statuses when we self-consciously adopt them as our own. This paper argues against this view and instead suggests that we identify with our social statuses when we care about them. Moreover, it theorizes care as a kind of emotional attunement to our social statuses that sometimes operates below the surface of self-reflective awareness.
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  41. Harry G. Frankfurt (author), Christine Korsgaard (commentary), Michael Bratman (commentary), Meir Dan-Cohen (commentary), Debra Satz (editor), taking ourselves seriously and getting it right. [REVIEW]J. S. Swindell Blumenthal-Barby - 2010 - Journal of Value Inquiry 44 (1):117-121.
    Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right is written in a manner that is accessible to all. Frankfurt’s arguments are, as usual, clear and persuasive. Korsgaard’s, Bratman’s, and Dan-Cohen’s comments are thought provoking. There are, however, two main areas in which Frankfurt’s arguments need clarification (the notion of wholehearted identification, and the concept of ambivalence), and there are misunderstandings of Frankfurt at work in Korsgaard’s (relationship between the self and the will, and concept of the will for Frankfurt) and Bratman’s (...)
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  42. Ambivalence.J. S. Swindell - 2010 - Philosophical Explorations 13 (1):23-34.
    The phenomenon of ambivalence is an important one for any philosophy of action. Despite this importance, there is a lack of a fully satisfactory analysis of the phenomenon. Although many contemporary philosophers recognize the phenomenon, and address topics related to it, only Harry Frankfurt has given the phenomenon full treatment in the context of action theory – providing an analysis of how it relates to the structure and freedom of the will. In this paper, I develop objections to Frankfurt's account, (...)
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  43. Self-constitution: agency, identity, and integrity.Christine M. Korsgaard - 2009 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Agency and identity -- Necessitation -- Acts and actions -- Aristotle and Kant -- Agency and practical identity -- The metaphysics of normativity -- Constitutive standards -- The constitution of life -- In defense of teleology -- The paradox of self-constitution -- Formal and substantive principles of reason -- Formal versus substantive -- Testing versus weighing -- Maximizing and prudence -- Practical reason and the unity of the will -- The empiricist account of normativity -- The rationalist account of normativity (...)
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  44. Personal autonomy.Sarah Buss - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    To be autonomous is to be a law to oneself; autonomous agents are self-governing agents. Most of us want to be autonomous because we want to be accountable for what we do, and because it seems that if we are not the ones calling the shots, then we cannot be accountable. More importantly, perhaps, the value of autonomy is tied to the value of self-integration. We don't want to be alien to, or at war with, ourselves; and it seems that (...)
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  45. How Many Accounts of Act Individuation Are There?Joseph Ulatowski - 2008 - Dissertation, University of Utah
    The problem of act individuation is a debate about the identity conditions of human acts. The fundamental question about act individuation is: how do we distinguish between actions? Three views of act individuation have dominated the literature. First, Donald Davidson and G.E.M. Anscombe have argued that a number of different descriptions refer to a single act. Second, Alvin Goldman and Jaegwon Kim have argued that each description designates a distinct act. Finally, Irving Thalberg and Judith Jarvis Thomson have averred that (...)
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  46. The Way of the Wanton.J. David Velleman - 2008 - In Catriona Mackenzie & Kim Atkins (eds.), Practical Identity and Narrative Agency. Routledge.
    Harry Frankfurt's philosophy of action as a prolegomenon to the Zhuangzi.
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  47. Kantian Autonomy and the Moral Self.Eric Entrican Wilson - 2008 - Review of Metaphysics 62 (2):355-381.
    This essay examines the connection between the concept of autonomy and the concept of an ideal, moral self in Kant’s practical philosophy. Its central thesis is that self-legislation does not rest on the capacity to exempt oneself from nature’s causal network. Instead, it rests on the practical capacity for identification with what Kant calls an individual’s “moral personality.” A person’s ability to identify with this morally ideal version of himself gives shape to his will, enabling him to decide how to (...)
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  48. Action.George Wilson - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    If a person's head moves, she may or may not have moved her head, and, if she did move it, she may have actively performed the movement of her head or merely, by doing something else, caused a passive movement. And, if she performed the movement, she might have done so intentionally or not. This short array of contrasts (and others like them) has motivated questions about the nature, variety, and identity of action. Beyond the matter of her moving, when (...)
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  49. The policy-based approach to identification.Christian Miller - 2007 - Philosophical Psychology 20 (1):105 – 125.
    In a number of recent papers, Michael Bratman has defended a policy-based theory of identification which represents the most sophisticated and compelling development of a broadly hierarchical approach to the problems about identification which Harry Frankfurt drew our attention to over thirty years ago. Here I first summarize the bare essentials of Bratman's view, and then raise doubts about both its necessity and sufficiency. Finally I consider his objections to rival value-based models, and find those objections to be less compelling (...)
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  50. Responsibility: A Puzzle, Two Theories, and Bad Background.Will Cartwright - 2006 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 13 (2):167-176.
    This essay seeks to illuminate both the theory and practice of holding people responsible. It investi- gates two leading accounts of responsibility, examining some of their implications and certain difficulties that they face. It tests the two accounts by applying them to an illustrative example, which demonstrates how the questions that are decisive in judging an agent’s responsibility are notably different on the two accounts. Although both views are variously illuminating, they each face difficulties and arguably depend on, or foster, (...)
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