Abstract

It seems clear, on the face of- it, that men act and bodies behave. Philosophers have often drawn our attention to the sorts of actions men perform. Moral choice, it is said, involves an act of will. Knowledge involves an act of judgment, an act of inference, or an act of synthesis. Some say there are acts of apprehension, consciousness, attention, doubting, sensing, remembering. Others include acts of abstraction and acts of spatialization. But one may ask what the evidence is for all of these actions. Do we observe or introspect our acts? Do we merely infer them? If we do not run across contents in our experience which we are willing to call acts, what can we mean by talking of acts at all? Perhaps there are no acts. Perhaps men, like bodies, simply behave.