Inspired by Weber’s charismatic carrier groups, Eisenstadt coined the term institutional entrepreneur to capture the rare but epochal collective capable of reorienting a group’s value-orientations and transferring charisma, while making them an evolutionary force of structural and cultural change. As a corrective to Parsons’ abstract, ‘top-down’ theory of change, Eisenstadt’s theory provided historical context and agency to moments in which societies experienced qualitative transformation. The concept has become central to new institutionalism, neo-functionalism, and evolutionary-institutionalism. Drawing from the former two, (...) a more robust theory of institutional entrepreneurship from an evolutionary-institutionalist’s perspective is posited. In essence, entrepreneurs formulate institutional projects with dual logic: a collective side focused on innovation where efforts are directed towards organizational symbolic mechanisms of integration and a self-interested side directed towards resource independence, monopolization, mobility, and power-dependence. While outcomes vary based on numerous environmental factors, success leads to (1) greater structural/symbolic independence and (2) ability to reconfigure physical-temporal-social-symbolic space. (shrink)

Is acrasia possible? Can you do wrong knowingly? Opinion divides. Each, to the other side, is a paradox monger.At issue is the most felicitous set of concepts and principles to bring to descriptions and evaluations of human action. So to speak, such a set is an outline of a script for reality to play: it provides identities and relations in which individuals and events or whatever may be cast. Deniers typically begin with a set that rules acrasia out of court, (...) recasting alleged examples in a different explanatory mold. Affirmers typically begin with plausible examples and look for a theoretical framework to place them in, taking those that disallow it to be absurd. But any denier, on legitimate dialectical grounds, can point out that such a reductio is a petitio. So it is a resilient issue, still with us after being bounced around so much in history. (shrink)

In this paper I give a novel argument for this view that the AGENT concept has an externalist semantics. The argument argues the conclusion from two premises: first, that our first relationships to agents is through a subpersonal mechanism which requires for its function an agential proto-concept which refers directly; and second, that there is a continuity of reference between this proto-concept and the mature concept AGENT. I argue the first on the basis of results in the developmental psychology of (...) social cognition. I argue the second on the basis of a process of elimination, by considering three possibilities for the relationship between the two concepts. On the basis of these two premises the conclusion is drawn that AGENT is a concept that refers directly. That has the following consequences for the philosophy of action: first, that “action” is not an appropriate term for reductive analysis, as the causal theory of action assumes; and second, that we should be looking to the appropriate empirical disciplines for an elucidation of the concept. (shrink)

While Nietzsche's rejection of metaphysical free will and moral desert has been widely recognised, the sense in which Nietzsche continues to use the term freedom affirmatively remains largely unnoticed. The aim of this article is to show that freedom and agency are among Nietzsche’s central concerns, that his much-discussed interest in power in fact originates in a first-person account of freedom, and that his understanding of the phenomenology of freedom informs his theory of agency. He develops a non-reductive (...) drive-psychological motivational theory: reflective judgement and reasons can motivate by means of affective orientations agents have due to their drives. In particular, due to a standing desire or 'instinct for freedom' agents can generate, in mental simulations, the necessary motivational affects to unify their drives in view of certain long-term goals. (shrink)

I argue that any approach to affordances that stays close to the letter of the law is not able to account for human agency and meaningful experience….

This paper examines how Nietzsche’s view of the mind and its relationship to nature informs his account of human agency. In particular, it focuses on his approach to the causal efficacy of conscious mental states. By examining the Leibnizean and Kantian background to this approach, I contend that Nietzsche proposes a naturalist but non-eliminativist account of mind, central to which is his anti-Cartesian denial that consciousness is intrinsic to the mental. However, Nietzsche ultimately oscillates between two accounts: the first, (...) which I call the ‘enchantment thesis,’ sacrifices the extrinsicality of consciousness but secures the causal efficacy of conscious mental states, whilst the second avoids enchanting nature, securing the extrinsicality of consciousness but sacrificing its causal efficacy. I argue that it is possible to reconstruct his arguments to combine elements of the conflicting accounts and to successfully hold together his anti-Cartesian account of mind with the possibility of autonomous human action. (shrink)

In his article The Nature, Importance, and Difficulty of Machine Ethics, James H. Moor distinguishes two lines of argument for those who wish to draw a “bright line” between full ethical agents, such as human beings, and “weaker” ethical agents, such as machines whose actions have significant moral ramifications. The first line of argument is that only full ethical agents are agents at all. The second is that no machine could have the presumed features necessary for ethical agency. This (...) paper shows why Moor is mistaken in his refutation of the first line of argument; it also makes a positive case that “weaker” ethical agents are not agents at all. This positive case, however, allows Moor’s rejection of the second line of argument to stand: allowing that there could be moral machines, but that these machines would have to be full moral agents and not merely something that models moral behavior or can be used in morally charged ways. (shrink)

Sense of agency is a compelling but fragile experience that is augmented or attenuated by internal signals and by external cues. A disruption in SoA may characterise individual symptoms of mental illness such as delusions of control. Indeed, it has been argued that generic SoA disturbances may lie at the heart of delusions and hallucinations that characterise schizophrenia. A clearer understanding of how sensorimotor, perceptual and environmental cues complement, or compete with, each other in engendering SoA may prove valuable (...) in deepening our understanding the agency disruptions that characterise certain focal neurological disorders and mental illnesses. Here we examine the integration of SoA cues in health and illness, describing a simple framework of this integration based on Bayesian principles. We extend this to consider how alterations in cue integration may lead to aberrant experiences of agency. (shrink)

Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought.

Questo articolo rilegge la letteratura critica e sociologica su algoritmi e IA alla luce di teorie sociali antropocentriche intorno al potere e alle sue dimensioni. Utilizzando come punto di partenza la classica distinzione concettuale tra potere di (agency) e potere su (dominio), illustro due teorizzazioni principali dell’agency degli algoritmi, che qui chiamo “reticolare” e “culturale”, e concettualizzo quattro dimensioni del dominio algoritmico: coercizione opaca, autorità computazionale, condizionamento strutturale e governamentalità dei dati.

In a fresh look at the age-old question of nature's laws versus individual choice, Machan offers an insightful discussion of human initiative as a basic feature ...

RÉSUMÉ: J'examine ici trois façons de défendre l'idée que les personnes ont individuellement une valeur. Je pars de la thèse selon laquelle la valeur des individus tient à la valeur de leurs qualités particulières. Je m'arrête alors sur l'objection que pour comprendre ce qui fait la valeur individuelle des personnes, il nous faut accorder une place distinctive à leurs conceptions d'elles-mêmes. L'approche par la conception de soi qui résulte de ces considérations se révèle problématique à l'examen, mais elle nous oriente (...) vers une façon «kantienne», plus satisfaisante, de rendre compte de la valeur des individus. L'explication en question développe la doctrine des «deux points de vue» avancée par Christine Korsgaard et fait reposer ma valeur en tant qu'individu sur la dignité qui est la mienne en tant que maître d'œuvre de ma propre vie, un titre que personne d'autre ne peut avoir. (shrink)