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  1. Agents in movement.István Zoltán Zárdai - 2019 - Kagaku Tetsugaku 143:61-83.
    The paper discusses the category of one of the most fundamental expressions of agency, those movements of agents that are actions. There have been three dominant views of action since the 1960s: 1. the Causal Theory of Action, 2. the Tryings/Willings view, and 3. Agent Causation. These views claim that actions are: 1. events of bodily movements which have the right causes; 2. specific types of mental events causing events of bodily movements; 3. instances of the causal relationship between agents (...)
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  • Explaining Actions and Explaining Bodily Movements.Maria Alvares - 2013 - In Giuseppina D'Oro & Constantine Sandis (eds.), Reasons and Causes: Causalism and Non-causalism in the Philosophy of Action. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 141-159.
  • The Instrumental Structure of Actions.Markos Valaris - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly 65 (258):64-83.
    According to current orthodoxy in the philosophy of action, intentional actions consist in intrinsically mindless bodily movements that stand in causal relations to appropriate mental states. This paper challenges this approach to intentional action, by arguing that there are not enough appropriate mental states around to ‘animate’ all of the bodily movements we intuitively count as intentional actions. In the alternative picture I suggest, the bodily movements that constitute our intentional actions are themselves to be thought of as cognitive events, (...)
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  • Reasons and Causes.Kieran Setiya - 2011 - European Journal of Philosophy 19 (1):129-157.
    Argues for a causal-psychological account of acting for reasons. This view is distinguished from a more ambitious causal theory of action, clarified as far as possible, and motivated—against non-reductive, teleological, and behaviourist alternatives—on broadly metaphysical grounds.
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  • Aristotle's Four Causes of Action.Bryan C. Reece - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2):213-227.
    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 (...)
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  • Action theory and the value of sport.Jon Pike - 2019 - Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 46 (1):14-29.
    ABSTRACTI present a corrective to the formalist and conventionalist down-playing of physical actions in the understanding of the value of sport. I give a necessarily brief account of the Causal Theory of Action and its implications for the normativity of actions. I show that the CTA has limitations, particularly in the case of failed or incomplete actions, and I show that failed or incomplete actions are constitutive of sport. This allows me to open up the space for another model, drawn (...)
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  • A nuanced critical realist approach to educational policy and practice development: Redefining the nature of practitioners’ agency.Jean Pierre Elonga Mboyo - 2018 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 51 (8):815-828.
    In an age of nationalisation of international educational policy, or vice versa, the politics and conflicts behind such policies often take centre stage to the detriment of professional expertise. In response, this article develops a nuanced critical realism to propose a practice-based development and implementation of educational policy reforms. Based on empirical reports of head teachers’ subversive practice, the article concludes by highlighting that professional expertise is a central component, dubbed ‘formless capability’, that all stakeholders use to turn policy intentions (...)
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  • John Duns Scotus versus Thomas Aquinas on action-passion identity.Can Laurens Löwe - 2018 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (6):1027-1044.
    ABSTRACTThis paper examines Thomas Aquinas’ and John Duns Scotus’ respective views on the action-passion identity thesis. This thesis, which goes back to Aristotle, states that when an agent causes a change in a patient, then the agent’s causing of the change is identical to the patient’s undergoing of said change. Action and passion are, on this view, one and the same change in the patient, albeit under two distinct descriptions. The first part of the paper considers Aquinas’ defence of this (...)
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  • ‘The doing is everything’: a middle-voiced reading of agency in Nietzsche.Béatrice Han-Pile - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (1):42-64.
    ABSTRACTNietzsche's famous claim, ‘das Thun ist Alles’, is usually translated as ‘the deed is everything’. I argue that it is better rendered as ‘the doing is everything’. Accordingly, I propose a processual reading of agency in GM 1 13 which draws both on Nietzsche's reflections on grammar, and on the Greek middle voice, to displace the opposition between deeds and events, agents and patients by introducing the notion of middle-voiced ‘doings’. The relevant question then is not ‘is this a doing (...)
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  • Causality, determination and necessitation in free human action.Vanessa Carr - 2022 - Synthese 200 (4):1-28.
    Human freedom is often characterised as a unique power of self-determination. Accordingly, free human action is often thought to be determined by the agent in some distinctive manner. What is more, this determination is widely assumed to be a kind of efficient-causal determination. In reaction to this efficient-causal-deterministic conception of free human action, this paper argues that if one takes up the understanding of determination and causality that is offered by Anscombe in ‘Causality and Determination’, and moreover takes up an (...)
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  • Are Events Things of the Past?Julian Bacharach - 2021 - Mind 130 (518):381-412.
    A popular claim in recent philosophy of mind and action is that events only exist once they are over. This has been taken to have the consequence that many temporal phenomena cannot be understood ‘from the inside’, as they are unfolding, purely in terms of events. However, as I argue here, the claim that events exist only when over is incoherent. I consider two ways of understanding the claim and the notion of existence it involves: one that ties existence to (...)
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  • Basic Actions Reloaded.Santiago Amaya - 2017 - Philosophy Compass 12 (9):e12435.
    In this article, I examine recent debates concerning the existence and the nature of basic actions. The discussion is structured around four theses, with which Arthur Danto introduced basic actions to contemporary theorists. The theses concern (i) the relationship between agency and causality, (ii) the distinction between basic and complex actions, (iii) the regress argument for basic actions, and (iv) the structure of practical knowledge in the light of these actions.
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  • Agency and Two‐Way Powers.Maria Alvarez - 2013 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 113 (1pt1):101-121.
    In this paper I propose a way of characterizing human agency in terms of the concept of a two‐way power. I outline this conception of agency, defend it against some objections, and briefly indicate how it relates to free agency and to moral praise‐ and blameworthiness.
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  • Muisti.Jani Hakkarainen, Mirja Hartimo & Jaana Virta (eds.) - 2013 - Tampere: Tampere University Press.
    Proceedings of the annual congress of the Finnish Philosophical Association in 2013. Theme: memory.
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  • Durand of St.-Pourçain on Cognitive Acts: Their Cause, Ontological Status, and Intentional Character.Peter Hartman - 2012 - Dissertation, University of Toronto
    The present dissertation concerns cognitive psychology—theories about the nature and mechanism of perception and thought—during the High Middle Ages (1250–1350). Many of the issues at the heart of philosophy of mind today—intentionality, mental representation, the active/passive nature of perception—were also the subject of intense investigation during this period. I provide an analysis of these debates with a special focus on Durand of St.-Pourçain, a contemporary of John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Durand was widely recognized as a leading philosopher (...)
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  • Aristotle on Spontaneous Generation, Spontaneity, and Natural Processes.Emily Kress - 2020 - Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 58.
    Aristotle contrasts standard animal generation with ‘spontaneous generation’, which happens when some material putrefies and gives rise to a new organism. This paper addresses two interrelated puzzles about spontaneous generation. First, is it of the same ‘fundamental kind’ of causal process as standard generation? Second, is it ‘spontaneous’, as understood in Physics 2.4–6: rare, accidentally caused, and among things that are for the sake of something? I argue that both puzzles turn on the same questions about the process types involved. (...)
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  • Self-Movement and Natural Normativity: Keeping Agents in the Causal Theory of Action.Matthew McAdam - 2007 - Dissertation, Georgetown University
    Most contemporary philosophers of action accept Aristotle’s view that actions involve movements generated by an internal cause. This is reflected in the wide support enjoyed by the Causal Theory of Action (CTA), according to which actions are bodily movements caused by mental states. Some critics argue that CTA suffers from the Problem of Disappearing Agents (PDA), the complaint that CTA excludes agents because it reduces them to mere passive arenas in which certain events and processes take place. Extant treatments of (...)
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  • Leibnizin pienet havainnot ja tunteiden muodostuminen.Markku Roinila - 2018 - Havainto.
    Keskityn siihen miten Leibnizilla yksittäiset mielihyvän tai mielipahan tiedostamattomat havainnot voivat kasautua tai tiivistyä ja muodostaa vähitellen tunteita, joista tulemme tietoisiksi.
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