Abstract

I argue that the dichotomous treatment of agency and free will is problematic because it rests on a Cartesian interpretation of self and world that many present-day thinkers take themselves to be denying. I do so in order to reconstruct the concept of human agency using the psychologies of American philosophers John Dewey and George Santayana. Identifying the self with the entire organism, as these thinkers do, allows for an importantly different sense of agency. In embracing an organismic interpretation of the self, we achieve a more realistic yet mitigated sense of agency, where real responsibility for action is placed in a context of biological and environmental (including social, cultural, and historical) influences.