Philosophy

This book pursues some novel and unusual standpoints in the philosophy of action. It rejects, for example, the most widely held view about how to count actions, and argues for what it calls a ‘prolific theory’ of act individuation. It also describes and argues against the two leading theories of the nature of action, the causal theory and the agent causal theory. The causal theory cannot account for skilled activity, nor for mental action. The agent causalist theory unnecessarily reifies causings. The book identifies an assumption that they share, and that most action theorists have assumed to be unproblematic and uncontroversial, that an action is, or entails the existence of, an event. Several different meanings to that claim are disentangled and in the most interesting sense of that claim, the book denies that it is true. The book's own alternative is simple and unpretentious: nothing informative can be said about the nature of action that explicates action in any other terms. The book sketches a theory of causal explanation of action that eschews the requirement for laws or generalizations, and this effectively quashes one argument for the oft-repeated view that no explanations of action can be causal, on the grounds that there are no convincing cases of laws of human action. It addresses a number of questions about the knowledge an agent has of his own actions, looking particularly at examples of pathological cases of action in which, for one reason or another, the agent does not know what he is doing.

The book contains innovative contributions to the history and the philosophy of logic and mathematics in the first half of the twentieth century. It is divided into five main sections: history of logic (from Russell to Tarski); foundational issues (Hilbert’s program, constructivity, Wittgenstein, Gödel); mathematics and phenomenology (Weyl, Becker, Mahnke); nominalism (Quine, Tarski); semantics (Tarski, Carnap, Neurath). The treatment exploits extensively untapped archival sources thereby making available a wealth of new material that deepens in significant ways our understanding of the above-mentioned areas. At the same time, the book is a contribution to recent debates on, among other things, the prospects for a successful nominalist reconstruction of mathematics, the nature of finitist intuition, the viability of alternative definitions of logical consequence, and the extent to which phenomenology can hope to account for the exact sciences.

This collection of original essays from leading researchers across a wide range of disciplines engages with a number of issues concerning ‘the aesthetic mind’. It is the only collection which specifically targets the extent to which the empirical sciences can contribute to our philosophical understanding of the notions of the aesthetic and the artistic. The questions addressed include the following: The collection is divided into seven parts: ‘The Aesthetic Mind’, ‘Emotion in Aesthetic Experience’, ‘Beauty and Universality’, Imagination and Make-Believe’, ‘Fiction and Empathy’, ‘Music, Dance and Expressivity’, and ‘Pictorial Representation’.

This volume collects most of the author's publications on human action since the 1970s. The essays collected here are concerned to answer the questions ‘What makes us agents?’ and ‘What makes us responsible to one another for how we live our lives?’ The author develops a unified account of human agency and responsibility in terms of our capacity for critical evaluation, or normative competence. We are agents because we have (and to the extent that we exercise) this capacity, and we are responsible to each other for our lives as reflections of our exercise of this capacity. The account is developed in these essays largely by considering possible sources of normative incapacity, such as compulsion, addiction, manipulation, childhood deprivation, and one's own desires. Many of these essays engage critically with contemporary accounts of free will, action, and moral responsibility.

Externalism about mental content is the view that things outside of the skin or in the past are constitutive parts of present mental states. Internalism is the denial of externalism. This book propounds a plausible physicalist internalism, called qualia empiricism. Qualia empiricism is the conjunction of a modal structuralist account of perceptual experience, an account of the content contributed to thought by referring terms that deploys rigidified description clusters, and an account of non-epistemic internal resources that can bridge those first two elements. It also argues that externalism is supported by no reasons that withstand close scrutiny. These include case-based arguments and arguments entwined with externalist accounts of perceptual states and language. The book critically considers externalist arguments rooted in work by Putnam, Kripke, Burge, Millikan, Dretske, Papineau, Prinz, Fodor, Harman, Stampe, Stalnaker, Tye, Kant, Williamson, disjunctivists, Wittgenstein, Wright, Davidson, and Brandom, among others.

What is intentionality? Intentionality is a distinguishing characteristic of states of mind such as beliefs, thoughts, wishes, dreams, and desires, which are about things outside themselves. This book explores various ways in which philosophers have tried to explain intentionality, and then suggests a new way. Part I of the book gives a critical account of the five most comprehensive and prominent current approaches to intentionality. These approaches can be summarized as the instrumentalist approach, derived from Carnap and Quine, and culminating in the work of Daniel Dennett; the linguistic approach, derived from the work of Chomsky and exhibited most fully in the work of Jerry Fodor; the biological approach, developed by Ruth Garrett Millikan, Colin McGinn, and others; the information-processing approach, which has been given a definitive form in the work of Fred Dretske; and the functional role approach of Brian Loar. Part II sets out a multi-level, developmental approach to intentionality. Drawing upon work in neurophysiology and psychology, the book argues that intentionality is to be found, in different forms, at the levels of brain functioning, prelinguistic consciousness, language, and at the holistic level of ‘whole person performance’ which is demarcated by our ordinary everyday talk about beliefs, desires, hopes, intentions, and the other ‘propositional attitudes’.

The literature on theoretical reason has been dominated by epistemological concerns, treatments of practical reason by ethical concerns. This book overcomes the limitations of dealing with each separately. It sets out a comprehensive theory of rationality applicable to both practical and theoretical reason. In both domains, the book explains how experience grounds rationality, delineates the structure of central elements, and attacks the egocentric conception of rationality. It establishes the rationality of altruism and thereby supports major moral principles. The concluding part describes the pluralism and relativity the book's conception of rationality accommodates and, taking the unified account of theoretical and practical rationality in that light, constructs a theory of global rationality — the overall rationality of persons.

This book presents essays in the form of thirteen chapters on the propositional imagination. The propositional imagination — the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that everyone is colour-blind or that Hamlet is a procrastinator — plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and in everyday life. These thirteen chapters extend the theoretical picture of the imagination and explore the philosophical implications of cognitive accounts of the imagination. The book also investigates broader philosophical issues surrounding the propositional imagination. The first section addresses the nature of the imagination, its role in emotion production, and its sophistication manifestation in childhood. The chapters in the second section focus on the nature of pretence and how pretence is implicated in adult communication. The third section addresses the problem of ‘imaginative resistance’, the striking fact that when we encounter morally repugnant assertions in fiction, we seem to resist imagining them and accepting them as fictionally true. In the final section, contributors explore the relation between imagining, conceiving, and judgements of possibility and impossibility.

This book is a comprehensive development and defence of one of the guiding assumptions of evolutionary psychology: that the human mind is composed of a large number of semi-independent modules. One goal is to argue for massive cognitive modularity. Another is to show that the approach has the resources to explain the distinctive powers of the human mind. A third goal is to show how the various components of the mind are likely to be linked and interact with one another. The book outlines and defends the basic framework of a perception/belief/desire/planning/motor-control architecture (which is common to all animal cognition), embedded within which is a distinctively human language faculty. The flexibility and creativity of the human mind (together with its characteristic capacities for science and sophisticated forms of planning) are then explained as utilizing mental rehearsal of actions (including inner speech), with the results being globally broadcast to the full range of central modules.

This book presents an examination of Aristotle's accounts of voluntariness in the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics. It makes the case that these constitute a theory of moral responsibility — albeit one with important differences from modern theories. Highlights of the discussion include a reconstruction of the dialectical argument in the Eudemian Ethics II 6-9, and a demonstration that the definitions of ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ in Nicomachean Ethics III 1 are the culmination of that argument. By identifying the paradigms of voluntariness and involuntariness that Aristotle begins with and the opponents (most notably Plato) he addresses, the book explains notoriously puzzling features of the Nicomachean account — such as Aristotle's requirement that involuntary agents experience pain or regret. Other familiar features of Aristotle' account are cast in a new light. That we are responsible for the characters we develop turns out not to be a necessary condition of responsible agency. That voluntary action has its ‘origin’ in the agent and that our actions are ‘up to us to do and not to do’ — often interpreted as implying a libertarian conception of agency — turn out to be perfectly compatible with causal determinism, a point the book makes by locating these locutions in the context of Aristotle's general understanding of causality. While Aristotle does not himself face or address worries that determinism is incompatible with responsibility, his causal repertoire provides the resources for a powerful response to incompatibilist arguments. On this and other fronts Aristotle's is a view to be taken seriously by theorists of moral responsibility.