The rehabilitation of spontaneity: A new approach in philosophy of action
Philosophy East and West 60 (2):pp. 207-250 (2010)
| Abstract | Scholars working in philosophy of action still struggle with the freedom/determinism dichotomy that stretches back to Hellenist philosophy and the metaphysics that gave rise to it. Although that metaphysics has been repudiated in current philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the dichotomy still haunts these fields. As such, action is understood as distinct from movement, or motion. In early China, under a very different metaphysical paradigm, no such distinction is made. Instead, a notion of self-caused movement, or spontaneity, is elaborated. In this article a general conception of spontaneity from early Daoism is explained, detailing its constituent aspects. Similar notions appeared from time to time in Western philosophy, and these instances are pursued, exploring how their instantiations differed from Daoist spontaneity and why. Based on these approximate examples of spontaneity and on early Daoist spontaneity, new criteria are postulated for a plausible theory of action that dispenses with presuppositions that eventuate in a freedom/determinism dichotomy, and instead the possibility is offered of a general model of action that can be applied smoothly across current philosophical and cognitive scientific subdisciplines. | |||||||||
| Keywords | Spontaneity Ziran Wu Wei Action Free Will Determinism Zhuangzi Daoism Laozi Schiller | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesVere Chappell (1994). Locke on the Freedom of the Will. In G. A. J. Rogers (ed.), Locke's Philosophy: Content and Context. Oxford University Press.
Susan L. Hurley (1998). Self-Consciousness, Spontaneity, and the Myth of the Giving. In Consciousness in Action. Cambridge.
Carl Ginet (1990). On Action. Cambridge University Press.
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