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Agency as a Two-Way Power: A Defence

The Monist 103 (3):342-355 (2020)

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  1. Failure and Success in Agency.David Heering - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (2):590-613.
    Agency often consists in performing actions and engaging in activities that are successful. We pour glasses, catch objects, carry things, recite poems, and play instruments. It has therefore seemed tempting in recent philosophical thinking to conceptualise the relationship between our agentive abilities and our successes as follows: (Success) S is exercising their ability to ϕ only if S successfully ϕ-s. This paper argues that (Success) is false based on the observation that agency also often consists in making mistakes. We bungle (...)
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  • Frankfurt cases, alternative possibilities and agency as a two-way power.Helen Steward - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (9):1167-1184.
    ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that having ‘leeway’ is part and parcel of what it is to be the agential source of an action, so that embracing source incompatibilism does not, by itself, absolve the incompatibilist of the need to find Frankfurtian agents to be possessors of alternate possibilities. I offer a response to Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, based on the idea that Frankfurt's Jones exercises the two-way power of agency when he acts – a (...)
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  • Adaptive abilities.Erasmus Mayr & Barbara Vetter - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):140-154.
    Abilities, in contrast to mere dispositions, propensities, or tendencies, abilities seem to be features of agents that put the agent herself in control. But what is the distinguishing feature of abilities vis‐à‐vis other kinds of powers? Our aim in this paper is to point, in answer to this question, to a crucial feature of abilities that existing accounts have tended to neglect: their adaptivity. Adaptivity is a feature of how abilities are exercised. The main reason for its relative neglect has (...)
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  • Agentive Duality reconsidered.Annina Loets & Julia Zakkou - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (12):3771-3789.
    A growing consensus in the literature on agentive modals has it that ability modals like ‘can’ or ‘able to’ have a _dual_, i.e. interpretations of ‘must’ or ‘cannot but’ which stand to _necessity_ as ability stands to _possibility_. We argue that this thesis (which we call ‘Agentive Duality’) is much more controversial than meets the eye. While Agentive Duality follows from the orthodox possibility analysis of ability given natural assumptions, it sits uneasily with a wide range of alternative proposals which (...)
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  • Agentially controlled action: causal, not counterfactual.Malte Hendrickx - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (10-11):3121-3139.
    Mere capacity views hold that agents who can intervene in an unfolding movement are performing an agentially controlled action, regardless of whether they do intervene. I introduce a simple argument to show that the noncausal explanation offered by mere capacity views fails to explain both control and action. In cases where bodily subsystems, rather than the agent, generate control over a movement, agents can often intervene to override non-agential control. Yet, contrary to what capacity views suggest, in these cases, this (...)
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  • Abilities, freedom, and inputs: a time traveller's tale.Olivia Coombes - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Edinburgh
    The philosophy of time travel is a sub-field of metaphysics – the study of what there is and what things are like – that considers questions about the possibility of time travel and what a world in which time travel is possible looks like. These questions range from whether time travel is actually possible, to how time travellers can act in the past or future. This thesis delves into a particularly interesting, yet historically undertreated theme: the abilities of time travellers (...)
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  • Abilities.John Maier - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    In the accounts we give of one another, claims about our abilities appear to be indispensable. Some abilities are so widespread that many who have them take them for granted, such as the ability to walk, or to write one's name, or to tell a hawk from a handsaw. Others are comparatively rare and notable, such as the ability to hit a Major League fastball, or to compose a symphony, or to tell an elm from a beech. In either case, (...)
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  • 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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  • Gender.Holly Lawford-Smith & Michael Hauskeller - 2022 - In Michael Hauskeller (ed.), The Things That Really Matter: Philosophical Conversations on the Cornerstones of Life. London: UCL Press. pp. 65-83.
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