New Essays on the Explanation of Action PDF
Preview New Essays on the Explanation of Action
New Essays on the Explanation of Action Forthcoming By Constantine Sandis A Companion to the Philosophy of Action (Wiley-Blackwell) (co-edited with Timothy O’Connor) New Essays on the Explanation of Action Edited by Constantine Sandis Oxford Brookes University and NYU in London Editorial selection and matter © Constantine Sandis 2009 Chapters © their individual authors 2009 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-52202-2 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-35668-3 ISBN 978-0-230-58297-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230582972 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 This volume is dedicated to Elizabeth Alice Sandis With all my love, in the year of our wedding This page intentionally left blank Contents Notes on Contributors ix Introduction 1 Constantine Sandis Part I Reasons and Causes 1 What Must Actions Be for Reasons to Explain Them? 13 Fred Dretske 2 What Are Reasons for Action? 22 Stephen Everson 3 Was Sally’s Reason for Running from the Bear that She Thought it was Chasing Her? 48 Rowland Stout 4 Con-reasons as Causes 62 David-Hillel Ruben 5 Agential Reasons and the Explanation of Human Behaviour 75 Peter Hacker 6 Reasons as Non-causal, Context-placing Explanations 94 Julia Tanney 7 Interpretative Explanations 112 G. F. Schueler 8 Anscombe on Expression of Intention 132 Richard Moran and Martin J. Stone 9 Can One Act for a Reason without Acting Intentionally? 169 Joshua Knobe and Sean D. Kelly 10 Reasons: Explanatory and Normative 184 Joseph Raz 11 Reasons, Desires and Intentional Actions 203 Maria Alvarez 12 A Niggle at Nagel: Causally Active Desires and the Explanation of Action 220 Charles Pigden vii viii Contents 13 Acting in Character 241 Annette Baier 14 Aquinas on Action and Action Explanation 257 Stephen Boulter 15 Acting for Reasons – A Grass Root Approach 276 Ralf Stoecker Part II Agency and Moral Psychology 16 Sub-intentional Actions and the Over-mentalization of Agency 295 Helen Steward 17 Determinism, Intentional Action, and Bodily Movements 313 Frederick Stoutland 18 Free Agency, Causation and Action Explanation 338 E. J. Lowe 19 Gods and Mental States: The Causation of Action in Ancient Tragedy and Modern Philosophy of Mind 356 Constantine Sandis 20 Aristotle’s Conception of Practical Thinking 384 A. W. Price 21 Action in Moral Metaphysics 396 Jonathan Dancy 22 Non-cognitivism and Motivation 416 Nick Zangwill Index 425 Contributors Maria Alvarez is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. She has published widely on actions, reasons, and their relation. Her most recent book is Acts and Facts: Reasons, Desires and the Explanation of Action (Oxford University Press, 2009). Annette Baier was educated at the Universities of Otago and Oxford. She taught at the universities of Aberdeen, Auckland, Sydney, Carnegie-Mellon, and Pittsburgh, and held visiting appointments at Florida Gainesville, City University of New York, and Michigan. Since retiring she lives in Queenstown, her birthplace, and Dunedin. She has published much about Hume, on trust, and about the philosophy of mind. Her books are Postures of the Mind (1985), A Progress of Sentiments (1991), Moral Prejudices (1994), and The Commons of the Mind (1997). (The last were her Carus Lectures. She also gave Tanner Lectures, on trust.) She has just published a new collection of essays entitled Death and Character: Future Reflection on Hume. Stephen Boulter is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom. Prior to taking up his current post he was Gifford Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow in 1998–1999. He is the author of The Rediscovery of Common Sense Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and is currently working on a book on Medieval Philosophy. Jonathan Dancy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, United Kingdom, and at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously he taught for 25 years at the University of Keele. He has written many articles on moral philosophy and on the philosophy of action, and his books include Moral Reasons (1993), Practical Reality (2000), and Ethics Without Principles (2004). He is currently working on a new account of the force of practical deliberation. Fred Dretske is Professor Emeritus at both Stanford University where he taught for 10 years and the University of Wisconsin where he taught for 25 years. He is currently a senior research professor (no teaching) at Duke University, United States. He has several books to his credit: He is the author of several books: Seeing and Knowing (1969), Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981), Explaining Behavior (1988), and Naturalizing the Mind (1995) as well as numerous a rticles. Some of these articles have been col- lected in Perception, Knowledge, and Belief (2000). His current research inter- ests centre on the nature of conscious experience and problems about self-knowledge. ix
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