Le principal objectif de cet article est de démontrer la thèse suivante : l’essentiel de la théorie aristotélicienne de l’action humaine repose sur le fait que l’agent est, au sens propre, capable d’agir autrement. Dans cette perspective, une distinction est établie entre la théorie de l’action et la psychologie morale d’Aristote. La première est structurée par la notion d’un agent capable au moment de l’action de choisir entre des contraires, tandis que la seconde se concentre sur la notion de caractère (...) qui impose une fixité et une régularité aux actions de l’agent. La distinction proposée s’appuie sur une interprétation renouvelée de EN 1112a31-33, passage dans lequel Aristote affirme que l’intellect (pratique) est cause au même titre que la nature, le hasard et la nécessité. (shrink)

Résumé — L’analyse de la condition ouvrière dévoile les conditions sociales de la constitution psychologique et morale de soi. Le système tayloriste est aliénant en ce qu’il anéantit la capacité de s’attribuer réalité et valeur, en forçant l’ouvrier à endosser des mobiles qu’il ne peut pourtant s’approprier car ils lui sont étrangers et humiliants, contraires à ses aspirations. Il dépend de l’extériorité – où il peut certes trouver des grandeurs de conventions mensongères, mais aussi ce qui lui est le plus (...) intérieur – pour comprendre les aspirations qui le constituent et rester en accord avec lui-même. Il ne faut donc pas opposer l’intériorité indépendante et l’extériorité, mais deux types de dépendance : à la force extérieure, qui brise le rapport à soi ; ou à la nécessité, intelligible, qui en permet l’instauration : il y a des conditions à l’autonomie morale, entendue comme capacité d’agir d’après l’intellection de la nécessité, seul mobile que le sujet peut s’approprier et qui l’élève. Cela permet de juger les sociétés, acceptables si leur fonctionnement est intelligible, si elles stimulent l’activité de compréhension, et offrent un milieu où sont exprimées les aspirations, la réalité et la valeur propres à l’individu.— The analysis of the working condition reveals the social conditions of the self psychological and moral constitution. The taylorist system is alienating since it annihilates the capacity to claim any reality and value, by forcing the workman to shoulder mobiles that he cannot afford because they are foreign and humiliating to him, opposites with his aspirations. Depending on the exteriority – where he can certainly find greatnesses of untrue conventions, but also what is most inner to him – he can understand the aspirations which constitute him and though remain in agreement with himself. One thus should not oppose independent interiority and the exteriority, but two types of dependence : on the external force, which breaks the relation with the self ; or on the necessity, intelligible, that allows the setting-up of it : there are conditions to moral autonomy, understood as the capacity to act according to the intellection of the necessity, sole mobile that the subject can take over and that emancipates him. That allows to evaluate the societies, acceptable if their way of processing is intelligible, if they stimulate the understanding activity, and offer a medium where the aspirations, reality and value that are peculiar to the individual are expressed. (shrink)

Poe’s influence on the Symbolists has been traced on many occasions, though not in detail. The classical study in English is Eliot’s “From Poe to Valéry,” a Library of Congress lecture delivered three years after Valéry’s death.2 Eliot defines Poe as irresponsible and immature—irresponsible in style, immature in vision. He had, Eliot comments, “the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty”; “all of his ideas seem to be entertained rather than believed” . How, then, we ask, did (...) he hoax the sophisticated French? Although Eliot raises the issue of their relative ignorance of English, he prudently does not make much of it: after all, we know that Baudelaire spent seventeen years on the tales, Mallarmé still longer on the poems—thirty years for the definitive text; while Valéry, to whom Baudelaire and Mallarmé left little to translate, managed a version of the Marginalia. Each might have said, as Mallarmé did in 1885, that he had learned English for one sole reason: “to read Poe better.”3 In the matter of linguistic competence, then, Eliot is content to remark that the French poets “were not disturbed by weaknesses of which we are very much aware” . He underlines, however, that Poe showed different facets of himself to each of his readers who adopted him in various ways: Baudelaire focused on the Poète maudit, Mallarmé on the prosodist, and Valéry on the theoretician in whom he discovered “a method and an occupation—that of observing himself write” . So Poe had a diverse effect, which Eliot accepts more readily in respect of Baudelaire and Mallarmé than he does of Valéry. To explain this last case which intrigues him especially, he introduces a paradox: “with Poe and Valéry, extremes meet,” he writes, “the immature mind playing with ideas because it had not developed to the point of convictions, and the very adult mind playing with ideas because it was too skeptical to hold convictions” .Thus Eliot damns Poe with faint praise. The distance between cause and effect, master and disciples is so vast that it can only be thought the product of monstrous error. And yet “from Poet to Valéry” and the complementary studies in English or French of the past thirty-five years neglect some deeper factors that drew the Symbolists. Misreadings there were no doubt since such are in the nature of things, but these authors were sensitive to currents that others overlooked. They attempted to go to first principles, not only because Poe was “ce poète incomparable, ce philosophe non refute” 4 and, therefore, worthy of scrutiny, but because they held him to be vital to their future thought. In a period of great social and aesthetic change they found a figure of radical independence—classicist, visionary, logician supreme—whom they explained by convergent tropes of daemonic power. In this regard the newly published correspondence of Mallarmé and the massive Valéry notebooks have added to our knowledge. I would like, then, to consider the nature of Poe’s action, this submerged dialogue in time and successive rewriting by which—“à l’égal de nos maître les plus chers ou vénérés,” as Mallarmé put it5—he entered the mainstream of French poetry. 2. The lecture was later published in Hudson Review 2 : 335; all further references to this work, abbreviated “FPV,” will be included in the text.3. Mallarmé, “Autobiographie,” Oeuvres completes, p. 662.4. Baudelaire, “Le Poème du hachisch,” Oeuvres complètes, 1:427.5. Mallarmé, “Scolies,” Oeuvres completes, p. 223. James Lawler, Edward arson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of French at the University of Chicago, has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry. Among his books are Lecture de Valéry, The Language of French Symbolism, The Poet as Analyst, and René Char: The Myth and the Poem. He is currently completing a study of Buadelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. (shrink)

Resumen La mayoría de los comentarios y estudios tradicionales sobre Tomás de Aquino, como los que han predominado en la escolástica y la neoescolástica, se han caracte rizado por el intelectualismo de su pensamiento basado principalmente, aunque no exclusivamente, en la primacía ontológica del intelecto sobre la voluntad; en la afir mación de la ignorancia como una de las causas primordiales del mal actuar, y en la existencia de una facultad como la voluntad que tiende a seguir el juicio de (...) la razón. En los últimos cincuenta años, sin embargo, esta interpretación ha sido revisada crí ticamente poniendo a la luz de los textos el valor de la voluntad en la antropología y la ética de Tomás de Aquino. Sin tratar de negar la presencia de elementos intelec- tualistas en su obra, el objetivo de este trabajo es reflexionar en torno a la existencia de cierto voluntarismo psicológico de santo Tomás con base en el papel que ejerce la voluntad en la realización del mal moral.Most of the studies and commentaries on Thomas Aquinas such as those made from the scholastic and neo-scholastic perspective have emphasized the intelectualism of his thought. This intelectualism is based mainly but non exclusively on the ontologicalprimacy of the intellect over the will, on the affirmation that the ignorance is one of the pivotal causes of evil actions, and on the fact that the will tends to follow the judgment of reason. Over the last fifty years, however, this reading has been the object of a critical revision by bringing to light in the texts the value of the will in Ethics and Philosophical Anthropology of Thomas Aquinas. Without the least intention of questioning the presence of intelectualist elements in his works, the aim of this paper is to reflect on some kind of psychological voluntarism in Thomas Aquinas, grounded on the role of the will in realiging the moral evil. (shrink)

There are thirteen essays in this collection. Sophisticated disquisitions on rather disparate topics, they contain a number of statements which are obscure to me and, I wager, to many readers, including metaphysicians. There is space here to note only a few of the several recurrent themes in Miller’s essays. First and foremost is the notion of the primacy of action. The affirmation of values, he says, is not a "matter of logic but of action," and "values become real only in (...) the deed"—values being prior to mere facts. Miller’s action-philosophy entails an exaltation of will over intellect. For instance, he says that "the pursuit of truth is itself a gesture of will." Another recurrent theme is the human inescapability of history—of time, process, transitoriness, corruptibility. What Miller calls "ahistorical sublimity" is purchased at too high a price-the price of a "radical impersonality" with an "apparent irrelevance to action and values." Miller’s view of freedom can be called intellectualist: "It is," he says, "in the ‘revision’ of truth that freedom is found." He refers not to "static" truth in the impersonal mode of physics but to dynamic truth in the mode of personal creativity. For "creative adventure," by action and experiment, he holds, is the mark of freedom. The entire "midworld" of artifacts, including arts, sciences, and languages, is the province of "responsible freedom." This whole area should be marked by "skepticism" as well as freedom, because skepticism is man’s best weapon against "absolutist pretensions," Miller persuasively argues. Furthermore, he stresses the point that there is no fact within our ken which is not linguistically expressible, so that "responsible humanism" is inconceivable without responsible use of language. The desideratum, as Miller says, is "controlled receptivity" regarding the employment of all linguistic signs and instruments. For "nature," the common object of all our knowledge, embraces not only facts but artifacts as well, including languages. He says that only "purposeful artifacts"-especially languages—put us in touch with actuality and history. History alone, he argues, leads into philosophy. "Ahistoric ideals," present everywhere in classical thought, stand in the way of this wedding of history and philosophy. A happy wedding for, according to Miller, there is no human knowledge that is not historical; everything human is dated. Miller is an action-philosopher because he is a history-philosopher. He contends that there is no freedom for us outside of history. He hails skepticism regarding "ahistoric ideals" as a kind of "negative absolutism." And he says that such skepticism is an "experience, not a theory," and that it makes "metaphysics of the transcendent" possible. He does not explain what that metaphysics is. Apparently, his "skepticism" is the awareness of the limited character of all philosophies. If so, it is, for Miller, our chief safeguard against the use of bloated language in the service of the ahistoric ideal.—J.F.A. (shrink)

In a recent paper, it was argued forcefully by Thomas Szasz that it is crucial to the scientific credibility of psychiatry that it abandon talk of the behaviour of the mentally “ill” in terms of causes: such behaviour is not caused by their condition—it simply has reasons, which are discounted by the medical model. It is argued in this paper that Szasz's theory is incomplete for two reasons: first, in assuming that reasons are radically different from causes, it cannot account (...) for the possibility that “sane” behaviour might be just as much caused as “insane”; and second, it tacitly assumes that the origin of behaviour always lies with the agent—a view that arguably is an accident of grammar. Hence while there is no mental illness, this is because there is nothing that could be ill—and this means that there is no such thing as mental “health” either. (shrink)

Researchers recently demonstrated a strong direct relationship between judgments about what a person knows and judgments about how a person should act. But it remains unknown whether actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments, or knowledge judgments cause actionability judgments. This paper uses causal modeling to help answer this question. Across two experiments, we found evidence that actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments.

A discussion of three central ideas in action theory; trying to act, doing or acting, one's action causing further consequences.

What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did? We may call such explanations rationalizations, and say that the reason rationalizes the action. In this paper I want to defend the ancient - and common-sense - position that rationalization is a species of ordinary causal explanation. The defense no doubt requires some redeployment, but not more or less complete abandonment of the position, as (...) urged by many recent writers. (shrink)

Paul Pietroski presents an original philosophical theory of actions and their mental causes. We often act for reasons: we deliberate and choose among options, based on our beliefs and desires. However, bodily motions always have biochemical causes, so it can seem that thinking and acting are biochemical processes. Pietroski argues that thoughts and deeds are in fact distinct from, though dependent on, underlying biochemical processes within persons.

To explain an intentional action one must exhibit the agent’s reasons. Donald Davidson famously argued that the only clear way to understand action explanation is to hold that reasons are causes. Davidson’s discussion conflated two issues: whether reasons are causes and whether reasons causally explain intentional action. Contemporary work on explanation and normativity help disentangle these issues and ground an argument that intentional action explanations cannot be a species of causal explanation. Interestingly, this conclusion is consistent with Davidson’s conclusion that (...) reasons are causes. In other words, reasons are causes, but rationalizing explanations are not causal explanations. Key Words: action theory • explanation • causal explanation • rationality • Donald Davidson. (shrink)

The causal theory of action is widely recognized in the literature of the philosophy of action as the "standard story" of human action and agency -- the nearest approximation in the field to a theoretical orthodoxy. This volume brings together leading figures working in action theory today to discuss issues relating to the CTA and its applications, which range from experimental philosophy to moral psychology. Some of the contributors defend the theory while others criticize it; some draw from historical sources (...) while others focus on recent developments; some rely on the tools of analytic philosophy while others cite the latest empirical research on human action. All agree, however, on the centrality of the CTA in the philosophy of action. The contributors first consider metaphysical issues, then reasons-explanations of action, and, finally, new directions for thinking about the CTA. They discuss such topics as the tenability of some alternatives to the CTA; basic causal deviance; the etiology of action ; teleologism and anticausalism; and the compatibility of the CTA with theories of embodied cognition. Two contributors engage in an exchange of views on intentional omissions that stretches over four essays, directly responding to each other in their follow-up essays. As the action -oriented perspective becomes more influential in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, this volume offers a long-needed debate over foundational issues. Contributors: Fred Adams, Jesús H. Aguilar, John Bishop, Andrei A. Buckareff, Randolph Clarke, Jennifer Hornsby, Alicia Juarrero, Alfred R. Mele, Michael S. Moore, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Josef Perner, Johannes Roessler, David-Hillel Ruben, Carolina Sartorio, Michael Smith, Rowland Stout The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

Aristotle’s typical procedure is to identify something's four causes. Intentional action has typically been treated as an exception: most think that Aristotle has the standard causalist account, according to which an intentional action is a bodily movement efficiently caused by an attitude of the appropriate sort. I show that action is not an exception to Aristotle’s typical procedure: he has the resources to specify four causes of action, and thus to articulate a powerful theory of action unlike any other on (...) offer. (shrink)

Review of Paul Pietroski, Causing Actions.

In this discussion paper, I seek to challenge Hylarie Kochiras’ recent claims on Newton’s attitude towards action at a distance, which will be presented in Section 1. In doing so, I shall include the positions of Andrew Janiak and John Henry in my discussion and present my own tackle on the matter . Additionally, I seek to strengthen Kochiras’ argument that Newton sought to explain the cause of gravity in terms of secondary causation . I also provide some specification on (...) what Kochiras calls ‘Newton’s substance counting problem’ . In conclusion, I suggest a historical correction .Keywords: Isaac Newton ; Action at a distance; Cause of gravity; Fourth letter to Bentley. (shrink)

Some of the claims of Paul Petroski's _Causing Actions_ are discussed in this review of the book.

Avicenna says that intellectual cognition involves the emanation of an intelligible form by the ‘agent intellect’ upon the human mind. This paper argues that in order to understand why he says this, we need to think of intellectual cognition as a special case of a much more general phenomenon. More specifically, Avicenna's introduction of an agent intellect will be shown to be a natural consequence of certain assumptions about the temporality, the completion, and the teleology of the causal (...) processes by which things acquire forms. (shrink)

This is a response to Andrei Buckareff and Jing Zhu, who in "Causalisms Reconsidered" criticize my argument in, primarily, "Considering Causalisms" and, secondarily, in "Does Philosophy of Action Rest on a Mistake?".

Paul Pietroski presents an original philosophical theory of actions and their mental causes. We often act for reasons, deliberating and choosing among options, based on our beliefs and desires. But because bodily motions always have biochemical causes, it can seem that thinking and acting are biochemical processes. Pietroski argues that thoughts and deeds are in fact distinct from, though dependent on, underlying biochemical processes within persons.

Stanley and Williamson reject Ryle's knowing‐how/knowing‐that distinction charging that it obstructs our understanding of human action. Incorrectly interpreting the distinction to imply that knowledge‐how is non‐propositional, they object that Ryle's argument for it is unsound and linguistic theory contradicts it. I show that they (and their interlocutors) misconstrue the distinction and Ryle's argument. Consequently, their objections fail. On my reading, Ryle's distinction pertains to, not knowledge, but an explanatory gap between explicit and implicit content, and his argument for it is (...) sound. I defend the distinction's necessity in explaining human action and show that it propels a fruitful explanatory program. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to consider two of the most popular arguments offered in support of the view that emotions do not cause actions. One argument suggests that emotions come after actions and therefore cannot cause them. The other argument suggests that emotions are not necessarily followed by actions and therefore cannot cause them. I argue that neither of these two arguments is compelling. At the same time, some of the concerns of causation skeptics can help us (...) better understand what a theory of the causal connection between emotions and actions should explain. (shrink)

Virtues can be considered to play a causal role in the production of behaviour and so too can our self-narratives. We identify a point of connection between the two cases and draw a parallel between them. But, those folk psychological notions, virtues and self-narratives, fail to reduce smoothly to the underlying human physiology. As a first step towards handling that failure to connect with the scientific framework that is the familiar grounding for our understanding of causation, we consider the causal (...) theory of action, a leading theory of action, which shows how reasons, understood as an appropriate pair of beliefs and desires, can be treated as causes of action. Davidson’s picture is based on cause as a relation between events, which can have both a description in scientific terms and in folk psychological terms. The character of both virtues and self-narratives is not that of events, even extended ones, so we need to refer to examples of scientific explanation that incorporate structural properties of objects. While we retain the spirit of the causal theory, we wish to guard against any unwarranted optimism that an explicitly scientific explanation for human action lies in our future, drawing on Chomsky’s view that a causal explanation of human actions is likely to remain beyond human science forming capacities. We take a mild-realist view of virtues and self-narratives, in the style of Dennett. We argue that, in spite of that limited form of realism, underlined by Chomsky’s mysterian position in this domain, we still need to frame our explanations of behaviour based on virtues and self-narratives in causal terms. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe is among the most distinguished and original philosophers alive today. Her work has ranged over many areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, ethics, the philosophy of mind and action, and the philosophy of religion. In each of these areas she has made seminal contributions. The essays in this book reflect the breadth of her interests and the esteem in which she is held by her colleagues. The distinguished contributors include Michael Dunnett, Nancy Cartwright, Peter Geach and Philippa Foot; and (...) Professor Anscombe's essay 'Making True' is published here for the first time. (shrink)

Philosophers like to worry about luck. And well they should. Luck poses potential difficulties for knowledge, moral appraisal, and freedom. The primary target of this paper will be the last of these concerns . Recent arguments from luck have been levied against libertarian accounts of free will, including agent-causal ones. One general goal of this paper will be to demonstrate the truth of an often overlooked claim about responsibility-undermining luck. Part of this task will include illustrating what is genuinely worrisome (...) about luck in the context of free will. It will turn out that the problem is not fundamentally a problem of explanation. Another aim will be to argue that the truth of this claim about luck reveals a problem for event-causal libertarianism but has yet to reveal a problem for the agent-causal view. For the purposes of this paper, it will be assumed that luck does indeed undermine free action and moral responsibility. But it will be argued that agent-caused actions have not been shown to be "lucky.". (shrink)

Why do things happen as they do in the universe of Oedipus Tyrannus, consisting of the play itself coupled with the myth that surrounds and informs it? Why is Oedipus fated to kill his father and marry his mother? What part does Oedipus play in his own destruction? What role do divinities play? And what of human free will? In what follows I consider the power of curses, prophecy, prayer, fate, the gods, and human self-determination as they serve to effect (...) the action.Generally accepted is the notion that the Greek audience knew the Oedipus myth before entering the theater. Sophocles's use of dramatic irony depends on this. But where does the myth begin? Sophocles starts in medias res with the plague, but the myth... (shrink)

One of the main difficulties with contemporary materialism is the risk of epiphenomenalism: if mental properties systematically depend on physical properties, how can they have causal efficiency? Davidson's anomalous monism' only solves this problem through a "feeble" understanding of the individuation of events and with relative imprecision as to the pertinence of causal explanations formulated in psychological terms. Nor do other conceptions of the individuation of events and the causal power of mental states, as that of Kim and of Jackson (...) and Pettit, solve the problem. It will not then be solved by modifying the theory of the individuation of events. (shrink)

A collection of essays in honour of the distinguished philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.