Reflection, Planning, and Temporally Extended Agency

Philosophical Review 109 (1):35 (2000)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

We are purposive agents; but we—adult humans in a broadly modern world—are more than that. We are reflective about our motivation. We form prior plans and policies that organize our activity over time. And we see ourselves as agents who persist over time and who begin, develop, and then complete temporally extended activities and projects. Any reasonably complete theory of human action will need in some way to advert to this trio of features—to our reflectiveness, our planfulness, and our conception of our agency as temporally extended. These are, further, features that have great significance for the kinds of lives we can live. For these two reasons I will say that these are among the core features of human agency. A theory of human action needs to say what these core features consist in and how they are related to each other. And such a theory needs also to clarify the relation between these core features of our agency and the possibility that we are fully embedded in an event causal order.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Modest Sociality: Continuities and Discontinuities.Elisabeth Pacherie - 2014 - Journal of Social Ontology 1 (1):17-26.
Shared Agency in Modest Sociality.Kirk Ludwig - 2014 - Journal of Social Ontology 1 (1):7-15.
Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together.Adam Morton - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly 65 (260):582-585.
Bratman i prakseologia minimalna.Piotr T. Makowski - 2013 - Ethics in Progress 4 (2):78-86.
Structures of agency: essays.Michael Bratman - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Introduction.Roman Altshuler & Michael J. Sigrist - 2016 - In Roman Altshuler & Michael J. Sigrist (eds.), Time and the Philosophy of Action. New York: Routledge. pp. 1-18.
Responsibility and planning.Michael E. Bratman - 1997 - The Journal of Ethics 1 (1):27-43.
Shared agency.Michael Bratman - 2009 - In Chrysostomos Mantzavinos (ed.), Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice. Cambridge University Press. pp. 41--59.

Analytics

Added to PP
2016-09-07

Downloads
46 (#303,387)

6 months
18 (#104,780)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Michael Bratman
Stanford University

Citations of this work

Oppressive Double Binds.Sukaina Hirji - 2021 - Ethics 131 (4):643-669.
Structures of agency: essays.Michael Bratman - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Free will.Timothy O'Connor & Christopher Evan Franklin - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Autonomy and addiction.Neil Levy - 2006 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (3):427-447.
Self-expression: a deep self theory of moral responsibility.Chandra Sripada - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (5):1203-1232.

View all 67 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references