Agency

Mind wandering is a pervasive feature of experience. But why does the mind wriggle about rather than stay focused? The answer depends on understanding mind wandering as task‐unrelated thought. Despite being the standard view of mind wandering in cognitive psychology, there has been no systematic elaboration of the task‐unrelated thought view of mind wandering. I argue for the task‐unrelated thought view by showing how mind wandering reflects a distinctive form of non‐vigilant thinking. This argument defuses several objections to the task‐unrelated (...) thought view. The account of mind wandering defended here is also compatible with a naturalistic account of subjectivity. (shrink)

This research explores the idea of plants as designers and discusses approaches that humans can use to support plant’s productive agencies. It argues that plants have unique and valuable capabilities for creating and caring for their environments. Human interventions often overlook or constrain such capabilities. In response, the article proposes to use numerical modelling to better understand plants better while challenging the anthropocentric assumptions that are common in design. It focuses on large old trees in Tasmania as examples of outstanding (...) plant-designers that need more recognition and protection. The article also raises open questions for further research on the ethical, ecological, and aesthetic implications of vegetal design. (shrink)

Which artificial intelligence (AI) systems are agents? To answer this question, I propose a multidimensional account of agency. According to this account, a system's agency profile is jointly determined by its level of goal-directedness and autonomy as well as is abilities for directly impacting the surrounding world, long-term planning and acting for reasons. Rooted in extant theories of agency, this account enables fine-grained, nuanced comparative characterizations of artificial agency. I show that this account has multiple important virtues and is more (...) informative than alternatives. More speculatively, it may help to illuminate two important emerging questions in AI ethics: 1. Can agency contribute to the moral status of non-human beings, and how? 2. When and why might AI systems exhibit power-seeking behaviour and does this pose an existential risk to humanity? (shrink)

The disappearing agent problem is traditionally cast as a tension between events and event-causation, on the one hand, and agents and agent-causation on the other. How- ever, as we show, the tension between events and agents can be recast as a tension between causation by agents and causation by parts of agents. If this is right, agent- causalists have their own disappearing agent problem to deal with. After setting out a version of this problem in the form of an overdetermination (...) argument, we present available responses to it. By examining these responses, our aim is to motivate the elaboration of an idea of derivative causation within agent-causal theories of action, whereby complex agents with parts cause whatever they must cause in order to act by way of their parts causing it. (shrink)

Can human agency produce things that are genuinely creative and original? Some philosophers are skeptical. Here I argue that the case of creative activity should lead us to reexamine and ultimately expand our conception of agency. When we do this, we see that rather than being incompatible with agency, creativity offers an especially robust form of agency: a form in which agents are responsible not just for token events but for the general patterns that characterize those events as forms of (...) human activity. -/- . (shrink)

The question of who possesses the moral rights of creative works made using the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) is not fully resolved. In particular, the relationship between moral rights and moral agency in the production of creative works has been under-investigated in the literature. I explore these topics and argue that moral agency, intentionality and values-based reasoning are crucial for the entitlement of moral rights and hence the assignment of authorship. I conclude that, despite their great power to produce (...) creative works, current generative AI systems cannot be the moral author of such works due to the absence of intentionality with values-based reasoning. Instead, the human end-user of a generative AI system is the moral author in most cases. (shrink)

This text should have been written by John Deely (1942–2017). But we all pass from this coil with our life’s work left unfinished—leaving thereby to others the choice of whether or not that work is continued. During our last conversation, knowing that his time in this life was limited, John expressed to me a wonder and a trepidation whether the human soul really is immortal. I repeated to him, in paraphrase, words he had once said in class: “It is an (...) experiment we all make, but only once.” He chuckled and said that’s true. -/- Reflecting at the distance of nearly seven years and having since oft-read C.S. Peirce’s brief essay, “Immortality in the Light of Synechism”, it occurs to me that the immortality of the individual soul is the wrong question, if we understand it strictly as materially individuated: for we are all of us sustained more by relationality than substantiality, by our common and shared intentionality, and though we may not know with certitude his final resting place, we do here—I hope—sustain something of the soul that belonged to John Deely. -/- I hope this doesn’t “go off the rails”. -/- All the contents are fully attributable to the author, Doctor Brian Kemple. Should you wish to get this text republished, get in touch with the author or the editorial committee of the Studia Poinsotiana. Insofar as possible, we will be happy to broker your contact. -/- Studia Poinsotiana The first-ever peer-reviewed scholarly publishing venue offering an encyclopedic web of understanding concentrating on John of St. Thomas (Poinsot). (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy of mind, understanding others is often presented as an activity of attributing mental states to agents or mindreading – the central question being then how to access their minds. The paper argues that this pervasive approach should be rejected, in favour of the view along which identifying an action comes from exercising conceptual skills acquired through being inserted into shared practices characterizing a social world. Examining the conditions of their acquisition then sheds new light on the semantics (...) of psychological concepts as well as on the roots of misunderstanding. (shrink)

This paper establishes a critical place of conversation between an ecofeminist type of contravening patriarchal and masculine-centered discourse and posthumanist attempts to problematize boundary-setting systems assembled around the conceit of speciesism and human privilege. Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Klara and the Sun (2021) supplies this conversational groundwork centered around the novel's main protagonist, Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF). The literary presence of Klara is designed to infract a conventional social space (dominated by humans), technically eroding the human/non-human and nature/culture duality. Such (...) erosion implies a transgression, portrayed in posthuman studies as a transcendence of the human and in ecofeminist studies as a deconstruction of the often-oppressive essentialist relationships of women and the environment. Transgression is the boundary-crossing mediation among actants. The novel permits us to see multivalent frames, each thematizing a posthuman future in terms of gender differences, the posthuman/human intricate gravitation towards loneliness, and, most of all, love. Through the examination of this work, an interrogation of the technological trajectory of the near future also suggests repositioning the role of posthumans concerning their environments. (shrink)

This article offers an account of Nietzschean decadence as a psycho-physiological condition characterized by a failure of psychic integration—a failure Nietzsche thinks precludes genuine agency, since the psychic integration the decadent fails to achieve is necessary for agency. As part of this account, this article develops an interpretation of an underexplored but crucial form of decadence: repressed decadence. Exploring this variety of Nietzschean decadence both enables us to make sense of the case of Wagner’s alleged decadence and adds nuance to (...) predominance models of Nietzschean unity. After developing this account, the article argues that Nietzsche finds decadence especially problematic when it disempowers (or obstructs the empowerment of) the individual who suffers from it, even if only in the long run. The article concludes by demonstrating that in (rare) cases in which decadence facilitates individual empowerment, Nietzsche evaluates it positively, finding such a condition worthy of affirmation. (shrink)

The German language introduction to animal agency.

In this paper I investigate where the boundaries of conscious mental life lie in Cavendish’s theory, and why. Cavendish argues for a wholly material yet wholly thinking universe. She claims that all matter is capable of “self-knowledge” and “perception” (OEP, p. 138), so that every part of nature “must have its own knowledge and perception, according to its own particular nature” (OEP, p. 141). It is unclear, however, whether the universal capacity of matter to know and perceive also implies the (...) presence of consciousness. I show that Cavendish’s use of the notions of “self-knowledge” and “perception” implies the attribution of consciousness to all bodies. I identify one condition under which the ubiquitous presence of consciousness is intuitively required in Cavendish’s system: namely the presence of intentional agency in every part of nature, which Cavendish conceives as necessary, alongside the capacity of self-motion, to account for the orderly behavior of any body. (shrink)

This article evaluates experiments seeking to teach human language to various non-human primates and birds, with a focus on the agency, self-expression and resistance to their own predicament that became apparent in the experimental subjects once communication was genuinely attempted with them, and the anthropocentric framing in which it was received and devalued in the general perception. -/- These experiments, the problematic assumptions behind them and the remarkable results deserve far more critical scientific and ethical analysis than they were given; (...) the full scope of what these animals proved capable of is still underestimated. (shrink)

This transdisciplinary anthology, a project of the "Chimaira - Working Group for Human-Animal Studies", is the first German-language publication to address the diverse questions surrounding animal agency and power. Human-Animal Studies are thus addressing a gap in previous research on the central concept of agency, which is on the agenda in a wide variety of disciplines. Controversial approaches beyond anthropocentrism, such as actor-network theory and new materialism, are explicitly focused on animal actors for the first time.

Any adequate theory of agency demands an account of what it is for an agent to have an action as an option, or of what I call the freedom relation. My dissertation develops just such an account. I argue, first, that attempts to reduce the freedom relation to something more basic fail, and therefore that we should be ontological primitivists about freedom; second, that attempts to give inferential justification for claims about the freedom relation fail, and therefore that we should (...) be epistemic primitivists about freedom. I then sketch an account that satisfies both of these constraints. On this account, freedom is a simple relation which is immediately perceived by agents, through familiar mechanisms of bodily awareness. I finally turn to the contentious question of whether freedom is compatible with determinism. I argue that the most defensible principle in traditional compatibilism is an epistemic one, according to which claims about freedom never provide justification for claims about a posteriori scientific hypotheses. Once we accept a perceptual account of the freedom relation, the truth of this principle turns on some subtle issues in the epistemology of perception. I discuss these issues and conclude that the compatibilist principle is one we should accept. (shrink)

This paper explores the distinction between active and passive powers. Interest in the distinction has recently been revived in some quarters of the philosophy of action as some have sought to elucidate the distinction between action and passion (the changes that happen to a substance) in terms of the former (Hyman, 2015; Mayr, 2011; Lowe 2013). If there is a distinction between active and passive powers, parallel to the distinction between action and passion, what is it? In this paper, I (...) distinguish two ways of drawing it. According to the first one, active and passive powers are distinguished by the ways in which their manifestations come about. According to the second, they are distinguished by their directedness, i.e. what they are powers to do. Both accounts are examined and the latter is defended against the former. I argue that active powers are powers to alter, modify, corrupt or change something. (shrink)

There is an ongoing debate in the ontology of action about whether actions are processes, events, relations, or sui generis entities. This paper focuses on the process view, the view that actions are processes. I challenge it in two ways. First, I argue that some actions are not processes because their performance need not be associated with or accompanied by a process. Second, I critically discuss three main arguments that have been advanced to support the process view. My view, the (...) pluralist view, is that process-theorists are right to hold that certain actions are processes, but wrong to maintain that every action is a process: activities are processes, acts are not, and some acts are composed of a process whereas others are not. (shrink)

My comments focus on the relation between theoretical reason and agency in Gomes’ account. I argue that, while Gomes is right that agency plays a role in relating us to an objective world, accounting for it does not require us to exclude theoretical reason in advance by requiring that the propositions to which we practically assent be theoretically undecidable. There are both theoretical and practical grounds for taking ourselves to have agency in thinking, and we should prefer an account of (...) reason which allows both kinds of grounds to play a role in rationalizing our commitments. Gomes should, therefore, weaken the dualism of theoretical and practical reason which he takes over from Kant. This dualism is in any event hard to sustain outside the context of transcendental idealism; weakening it allows for what I suggest is a better account of the interaction between theoretical and practical reason. (shrink)

While there has been much discussion of whether AI systems could function as moral agents or acquire sentience, there has been very little discussion of whether AI systems could have free will. I sketch a framework for thinking about this question, inspired by Daniel Dennett’s work. I argue that, to determine whether an AI system has free will, we should not look for some mysterious property, expect its underlying algorithms to be indeterministic, or ask whether the system is unpredictable. Rather, (...) we should simply ask whether we have good explanatory reasons to view the system as an intentional agent, with the capacity for choice between alternative possibilities and control over the resulting actions. If the answer is “yes”, then the system counts as having free will in a pragmatic and diagnostically useful sense. (shrink)

Fear is a preventer, sometimes robustly so. When fear robustly prevents, it changes or diminishes what an agent is able to do. Various popular conceptions of fear focus on its negative role: fear sometimes prevents us from acting as we should, as in certain cases of akrasia. But by the same token, fear sometimes prevents us from acting as we shouldn’t, as in certain other cases of inverse akrasia. We end with a plea on behalf of fear, both in light (...) of its preventing role and its broader connection to other ways we express concern, in particular, to hope. (shrink)

This article offers an account of Nietzschean decadence as a psycho-physiological condition characterized by a failure of psychic integration—a failure Nietzsche thinks precludes genuine agency, since the psychic integration the decadent fails to achieve is necessary for agency. As part of this account, this article develops an interpretation of an underexplored but crucial form of decadence: repressed decadence. Exploring this variety of Nietzschean decadence both enables us to make sense of the case of Wagner’s alleged decadence and adds nuance to (...) predominance models of Nietzschean unity. After developing this account, the article argues that Nietzsche finds decadence especially problematic when it disempowers (or obstructs the empowerment of) the individual who suffers from it, even if only in the long run. The article concludes by demonstrating that in (rare) cases in which decadence facilitates individual empowerment, Nietzsche evaluates it positively, finding such a condition worthy of affirmation. (shrink)

Although doubt (Tvivl) and despair (Fortvivlelse) are widely recognized as two central and closely associated concepts in Kierkegaard’s authorship, their precise relationship remains opaque in the extant interpretive literature. To shed light on their relationship, this paper develops a novel interpretation of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the connection between despair and our agency over our beliefs, and its significance for Kierkegaard’s ethics of belief. First, I show that an important yet largely overlooked form of Kierkegaardian despair involves either failing to take (...) ethico-religious responsibility for one’s practical agency over one’s beliefs, or misusing one’s practical agency over one’s beliefs by refusing to recognize or comply with externally given ethico-religious norms governing belief. Second, I argue that Kierkegaard takes properly exercising one’s agency over one’s beliefs to matter because beliefs are partly constitutive of the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) that Kierkegaard regards as the cure for despair. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a new approach to we-mode agency drawing on the concept of layered agency. I argue that agents can shut out their personal attitudes in favour of a perspective jointly established with other people. I can act as a member of the philosophy department aiming for what the department agreed on, even if that might conflict with my personal beliefs. I can shut out these personal beliefs for a moment and reason from the group’s standpoint. While (...) this observation itself is not novel, I provide an original account for this phenomenon building on C. Thi Nguyen’s proposal of layered agency. I then use this new account of the we-mode as a basic building block for conceptualising social groups and group attitudes. I end by showing how the proposal deals with common cases from the literature. (shrink)

The problem of luck is one of the most formidable obstacles currently facing libertarian theories of free will. Some have argued that there is no problem, while others have argued that the problem is not a unique one for libertarians. Still others acknowledge the problem and aim to address it with their preferred libertarian theory. Steward (2012) takes the latter strategy with her agency incompatibilism. She develops a version of the problem of present luck and argues that agents who possess (...) a two-way power, which is a power to either perform some action or refrain from performing it, avoid the problem. If she is successful this would be a big point in favor of agency incompatibilism, and it could indicate a successful strategy for others to follow. I argue that just as Steward insists that we ought to move from more robust abilities to the ability to refrain, the proponent of the problem of luck can do the same, and, once doing so, they can posit a very similar luck objection to refraining. Moreover, I suggest that the ability to settle that Steward defends is not robust enough to ground moral responsibility. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against the view that existing AI systems can be deemed agents comparably to human beings or other organisms. I especially focus on the criteria of interactivity, autonomy, and adaptivity, provided by the seminal work of Luciano Floridi and José Sanders to determine whether an artificial system can be considered an agent. I argue that the tentacles of octopuses also fit those criteria. However, I argue that octopuses’ tentacles cannot be attributed agency because their behavior can (...) be meaningfully interpreted only in reference to the octopus’ organism as an entire system. I argue that attributing agency to AI systems faces similar difficulties, and propose an alternative characterization of these systems as responsive and contested scaffolds. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate where the boundaries of conscious mental life lie in Cavendish’s theory, and why. Cavendish argues for a wholly material yet wholly thinking universe. She claims that all matter is capable of “self-knowledge” and “perception” (OEP, p. 138), so that every part of nature “must have its own knowledge and perception, according to its own particular nature” (OEP, p. 141). It is unclear, however, whether the universal capacity of matter to know and perceive also implies the (...) presence of consciousness. I show that Cavendish’s use of the notions of “self-knowledge” and “perception” implies the attribution of consciousness to all bodies. I identify one condition under which the ubiquitous presence of consciousness is intuitively required in Cavendish’s system: namely the presence of intentional agency in every part of nature, which Cavendish conceives as necessary, alongside the capacity of self-motion, to account for the orderly behavior of any body. (shrink)

In this paper, the author will explore the relationship between agency and intentionality of the artificial agent in the following seven ways.

I argue that Hegel’s concept of freedom requires the dissolution of dichotomies between history and nature. Ultimately, dissolving them would lead to an embodied concept of agency, whereby the singularity of each concrete organism finds normative expression within a free form of life. For that, I suggest that the dialectical thesis of speculative identity intertwines social critique with the critique of philosophical language. I shall call this procedure a “grammatical critique”, revealing Hegel’s shift to a vital normativity as its therapeutic (...) moment. That will allow me to present the social pathologies of dualistic forms of life as a withholding of the fluidity of organic nature, instantiated in the body-mind split. I then turn to Adorno’s notion of “recording nature”, arguing that it fulfils the dialectical criteria for a free form of life, that is: one in which its agents are able to reflexively enact their vital normativity. (shrink)

Antiquated Classical pictures of the universe have been formative in shaping the modern idea that, to the extent change is caused, it is fixed in advance. This idea has played a role in making it seem to many that what we are discovering through science supports the exclusion of free will from models for the relevant neural and bodily changes. I argue that giving up this unwarranted notion about causation opens us to the likelihood that how a person expresses free (...) will offers unique explanatory value. I then briefly discuss some further issues with either including or excluding expressions of free will from our explanations, as well as some implications for AI and everyday life. (shrink)

É. Boisseau, ‘The Metonymical Trap’, in Alice C. Helliwell, Alessandro Rossi, Brian Ball (eds), Wittgenstein and Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1 Mind and Language, Anthem Press, pp. 85-104, 2024. -/- In this chapter, I discuss and evaluate the question of the attribution of predicates to machines. Specifically, I address the question of the literal or metonymic nature of such attributions. In order to do so, I distinguish between what I call ‘physical’ or ‘natural’ predicates on the one hand, and ‘intellectual’ or (...) ‘cognitive’ predicates on the other hand. I argue that while the former can be ascribed indistinguishably and literally both to a human and a non-human agent, the latter can only be ascribed literally to human agents. I then suggest that there is a risk of falling into what I call the ‘metonymical trap’, which consists in forgetting that the ascription of cognitive predicates to machines is only a derivative one and of therefore taking the machine used to perform an action for the literal subject of that action. (shrink)

Davidson’s theory of agency aims to solve the dilemma that the same action can be both intentional and not intentional. He explains primitive actions using primarily bodily movements and argues that event-causality can be described through the “accordion effect”, but not agent-causality. And Davidson uses reasons as causes to explain the actions and responds to five objections. In this paper, I critique Davidson’s argument, pointing out that he ignores certain factors in the belief-desire model, such as emotions. And his sentence (...) holism has a problem because individual words that express complete thoughts can explain actions in language games. As a result, Davidson’s criticism of Wittgenstein is not reasonable. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new framework for investigating neural signals sufficient for a conscious sensation of movement and their role in motor control. We focus on signals sufficient for proprioceptive awareness, particularly from muscle spindle activation and from primary motor cortex (M1). Our review of muscle vibration studies reveals that afferent signals alone can induce conscious sensations of movement. Similarly, studies employing peripheral nerve blocks suggest that efferent signals from M1 are sufficient for sensations of movement. On this basis, we (...) show that competing theories of motor control assign different roles to sensation of movement. According to motor command theories, sensation of movement corresponds to an estimation of the current state based on afferent signals, efferent signals, and predictions. In contrast, within active inference architectures, sensations correspond to proprioceptive predictions driven by efferent signals from M1. The focus on sensation of movement provides a way to critically compare and evaluate the two theories. Our analysis offers new insights into the functional roles of movement sensations in motor control and consciousness. (shrink)

The predictive processing literature contains at least two different versions of the framework with different theoretical resources at their disposal. One version appeals to so-called optimistic priors to explain agents’ motivation to act (call this optimistic predictive processing). A more recent version appeals to expected free energy minimization to explain how agents can decide between different action policies (call this preference predictive processing). The difference between the two versions has not been properly appreciated, and they are not sufficiently separated in (...) the literature. They constitute two different theories with strikingly different accounts of motivation and action. By reducing all desire-like constructs to belief-like constructs, optimistic predictive processing entails a substantial revision of standard accounts of motivation and action in philosophy and cognitive science. By contrast, preference predictive processing introduces desire-like constructs that play Humean motivational roles in the explanation of action. In this Humean iteration, predictive processing resembles other prominent computational frameworks implementing a distinction between beliefs and desires, such as reinforcement learning and Bayesian decision theory. Ultimately, predictive processing faces a dilemma between parsimony of mental constructs and completeness of its explanations of agency and the mind. (shrink)

This paper explores the form of persistence distinctive of intentional actions. Unlike entities whose progression through time is typically continuous, our actions often have parts separated in time by a gap in our own activity. The way in which their coherence is understood thus affects their attribution to us. I present a theory of agency at the gaps that accounts for such phenomena and passes two touchstones. It solves the puzzle of the time of a killing in a new way (...) and provides a support to the assessment of moral agency. (shrink)

En este artículo se presentan resultados de un proyecto de investigación que se propuso analizar trayectorias de clase de familias del Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires pertenecientes a sectores medios. Entre las estrategias cualitativas, se han realizado 18 entrevistas semiestructuradas a mujeres y varones nacidos en la década de 1950 y en la década de 1970, con el fin de comparar los acontecimientos biográficos y familiares de estas dos cohortes, según la posición de clase a través del tiempo. El análisis (...) de las entrevistas sugiere que existen representaciones compartidas entre distintos perfiles de personas pertenecientes a sectores medios respecto de las oportunidades y especialmente de las limitaciones que ha presentado Argentina en el largo plazo para el bienestar material y la mejora en las condiciones de vida. -/- Representations about living conditions in Argentina from metropolitan middle class Abstract. This article presents results of a research project that aimed to analyze class trajectories of families in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires belonging to middle classes. Among the qualitative strategies, 18 semi-structured interviews have been carried out with women and men born in the 1950s and the 1970s, in order to compare the biographical and family events of these two cohorts, according to class position through time. The analysis of the interviews suggests that there are shared representations among different profiles of people belonging to middle sectors regarding the opportunities and especially about limitations that Argentina has presented in the long term for material well-being and improvement in living conditions. Keywords: living conditions; Argentina; representations; social class; generation. (shrink)

This is an encyclopedia entry written for the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. It provides an overview of the concept of and literature surrounding "group agency" from the perspective of analytic philosophy. It begins with an introduction to agency in its most general sense before examining agency in the social world. Next, group agency as a research field is presented in the context of the problem of collective intentionality. Here, accounts of group intentions are presented, before (...) moving into considerations on structure and metaphysics of group agents. Then, the features of and conditions for group agency are clarified, as well as its relation to rationality and mind. The entry closes with heterodox views of group agency and a description of group agency’s lasting relevance to law and social philosophy. -/- Shussett, Daniel. 2024. “Group Agency.” In M. Sellers & S. Kirste (Eds.), Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer. (shrink)

Some research suggests that moral behavior can be strongly influenced by trivial features of the environment of which we are completely unaware. Philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have argued that these findings undermine our commonsense notions of agency and responsibility, both of which emphasize the role of practical reasoning and conscious deliberation in action. We present the results of four vignette-based studies (N = 1,437) designed to investigate how people think about the metaphysical and moral implications of scientific findings that reveal (...) our susceptibility to automaticity and situational influences. When presented with lightly fictionalized narratives about these findings, participants exhibit no tendency toward changing judgments of freedom and responsibility compared to control groups. This suggests that people seem unwilling to adopt skeptical attitudes about agency on the basis of these scientific findings. (shrink)

Control is typically accepted as a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Thus, humans are morally responsible for their actions only if we can realise the right kind of control. Are there good reasons to think that humans can psychologically realise control? This paper is an attempt to address this question by establishing choice and agenthood as separate but interconnected aspects of control. I consider two challenges to the claim that humans can realise the kind of control required for moral responsibility. (...) First, an empirical challenge from cognitive neuroscience provides a familiar way to argue against the realisation of the choice aspect by human psychology. Second, a more formidable conceptual challenge to the aspect of agenthood presents us with scepticism about the kind of explanations that psychology can provide. The second challenge suggests that, in psychological accounts of choice, the agent disappears. Drawing on recent empirical models of cognitive control and philosophical accounts of agency, I conclude that the psychological explanation of choice is consistent with the aspect of agenthood being realised by human psychology. (shrink)

This essay defends the claim that episodic remembering is a mental action by arguing that episodic remembering and sensory- or experience-like imagining are of a kind in a way relevant for agency. Episodic remembering is a type of imaginative project that involves the agential construction of imagistic-content and that aims at (veridically) representing particular events of the personal past. Neurally intact adults under normal conditions can token experiential memories of particular events from the personal past (merely) by intending or trying (...) to. An agent’s ability to actively remember depends not only on her being able to determine that some memory event occurs but on her ability to construct the relevant scene at will as well. I claim that the ability to guide construction with respect to imagistic-content is distinctive feature of a subset of active imagining. Episodic remembering is of a kind with that subset of active imagining by being a process of agential construction of imagistic-content, in this case, scene construction that aims at (veridically) representing the personal past. Agential scene construction in the context of remembering is the agent’s exploring her personal past as a highly circumscribed region of modal space. (shrink)

The Spiritual Forms in Nicolai Hartmann’s critical ontology. For a critical-genetic interpretation of The Problem of Spiritual Being. The Author critically discusses the theoretical assumptions underlying Nicolai Hartmann’s 1933 The Problem of Spiritual Being. The Author deals with the main categorial problems involved in the Hartmannian discussion about the spiritual being, also looking at his previous production. In particular, the Author analyzes the position of the ontic level of spiritual being with respect to the previous three real ontic levels (inorganic, (...) organic, psychological) and the mutual relationship between the three fundamental forms of spiritual being identified by Hartmann (personal, objective, objectified). The Author believes that the 1933 volume has been poorly considered in its direct links with the overall project of critical ontology. (shrink)

Mind wandering has been a target of a fast-expanding area of research in cognitive science and philosophy. One of the central puzzles that researchers have been grappling with is whether this mental process should be thought of as passive or active in nature. Intuitively, a wandering mind seems passive but mounting empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Irving (2021) defends a prominent account of mind wandering as unguided attention, which aims inter alia to resolve the puzzle. However, I present counterexamples that reveal (...) Irving’s account to be both too weak and too strong. I then develop the alternative proposal that (stated roughly) mind wandering consists in voluntarily passive attention. After unpacking and defending this idea, I show how it helps to eliminate the conflicting appearance of mind wandering as both passive and active. (shrink)

Mental actions are things we do with our minds. Consider inferring, deliberating, imagining, remembering, calculating, and so on. I introduce a non-reductive alternative to standard causalist accounts of mental action that understands such action in terms of dispositions for performing mental actions. I call this alternative the powers framework. On the powers framework, habitual and skillful mental actions are themselves infused with practical intelligence by being expressions of the agent’s rational tendencies and capacities, respectively. The intelligence exemplified in the performance (...) of habitual and skillful mental actions stems from the agent’s having shaped the corresponding tendencies and capacities through training and practice. In this way, mental habits and skills are ‘second nature’ to us. I substantiate the powers framework by giving an account of imagining as a type of skillful mental action. In particular, I argue that imagination is a power to construct representations and select their contents as a means to performing learned behaviors like pretending, engaging with fiction, predicting others’ behavior, reasoning about possibility and necessity, reasoning hypothetically or counterfactually about contingent matters of fact, and even imagining for its own sake. I extend the account of imagining to episodic remembering. I argue that such remembering, considered as a mental action, is a kind of imagining by virtue of the agent’s constructing a representation and selecting its content as a means of performing the learned behavior of navigating her personal past. (shrink)

Following the social conception of moral agency, this paper claims that many beings commonly exempted from moral responsibility, like young children, adults with late-stage dementia, and nonhuman animals, may nevertheless qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices. Blame and other moral responsibility responses are understood according to the communicative emotion account of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone means having an emotion episode that acts as a vehicle for conveying a particular moral content. Therefore, moral agency is argued to be (...) manifested in communicative exchanges between a claimant and a defendant. While many human and nonhuman agents are justifiably exempted from ascriptions of moral responsibility, this does not necessarily exclude such agents from the community of moral agents altogether. Toddlers and dogs, for instance, seem capable of other-directed reactive attitudes, like resentment, and could, therefore, qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices with respect to the claimant position. Therefore, we may have reason to adopt a distinct claimant-directed participant stance to some beings, even if they fail to qualify as apt targets of blame. This expanded theoretical room for moral agency is argued to make explicit further normative considerations. (shrink)

Social constructivist accounts purport to examine the individual from the standpoint of society. However, Zahavi argues that such accounts are incapable of explaining the ‘mineness’ character of experience. In this paper, by using Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, I respond to Zahavi by offering a Bourdieusian social constructivist account that captures the ‘mineness’ of the practical experiences of social subjects inhabiting social habitats. Bourdieu’s account, I conclude, offers an important theoretical resource for philosophers to better grasp the social-individual relationship.

Unlike Western philosophers, classical Buddhist thinkers largely remained silent about socio-political issues and did not develop explicit frameworks for theorizing them. The present article reconstructs a Buddhist account of shared action based on select passages from works by the Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu. It outlines the structure of individual action, according to Vasubandhu, and identifies three conditions that need to be satisfied for a joint activity to take place. This model, I suggest, is reductive in seeing joint action as an (...) aggregation of individual actions, and it differs from Western treatments of shared agency in several respects. Primarily, Vasubandhu’s paradigm rests on an extended structure of action, it is guided by an internalist standard of moral evaluation that emphasizes the consequences of shared actions for the acting members, and it is centrally concerned with how individuals can extricate themselves from social entanglements and gain control over their actions. (shrink)

The causal theory of action is thought to be plagued by the problem of the disappearing agent. However, philosophers have reached no consensus on the nature of this problem, let alone on whether it is solvable. In this article, I interpret the problem as a phenomenological challenge: the causal theory of action employs an event-causal framework, with which certain aspects of the phenomenology of agency seem incompatible. I examine two areas in which the phenomenology appears to speak against an event-causal (...) framework: (1) the phenomenology of acting and (2) the phenomenology of making choices. Specifically, some philosophers have asserted that the phenomenology of acting involves content that action is caused by the agent themselves rather than by their mental states. Some philosophers have argued that the phenomenology of making choices involves content that the agent stands apart from their mental states in a way that allows them to reflect on, evaluate, or even manipulate their mental states. I argue that in neither case does the phenomenology pose a real challenge to the causal theory of action. (shrink)

The present chapter examines the philosophical problem of how it is possible, metaphysically and practically speaking, to develop a good moral character when one adheres to the view that a persisting self does not exist. It extracts answers from two thinkers who reject the concept of enduring identity, the Indian philosopher Vasubandhu (4th to 5th centuries CE) and the Western philosopher Derek Parfit (1942–2017). The first section of the chapter outlines some of Vasubandhu’s and Parfit’s shared assumptions concerning the nature (...) of the self and that of personal identity. In section 2, the focus shifts to the distinct ways in which each philosopher advances his understanding of the moral agent. Section 3 suggests that besides formulating different accounts of selfless agency, the ways in which Vasubandhu and Parfit grappled with the problem of agency reveal different approaches to addressing the question of human nature, and consequently, different ways of resolving the difficulties involved in becoming a good person. These differences become apparent in two practices that are relevant to crafting a moral character and that the two thinkers treat, moral commitment and the cultivation of virtue, which are discussed in the final part of the chapter. (shrink)