Our self‐understanding as human agents includes commitment to three crucial claims about human agency: That agents must be active, that actions are part of the natural order, and that intentional actions can be explained by the agent's reasons for acting. While all of these claims are indispensable elements of our view of ourselves as human agents, they are in continuous conflict and tension with one another. One of the central tasks of philosophy of action consists in showing how, despite appearances, these conflicts can be resolved and our self‐understanding as agents be vindicated. The main ... More

Our self‐understanding as human agents includes commitment to three crucial claims about human agency: That agents must be active, that actions are part of the natural order, and that intentional actions can be explained by the agent's reasons for acting. While all of these claims are indispensable elements of our view of ourselves as human agents, they are in continuous conflict and tension with one another. One of the central tasks of philosophy of action consists in showing how, despite appearances, these conflicts can be resolved and our self‐understanding as agents be vindicated. The mainstream of contemporary philosophy of action thinks that this task can be fulfilled by an event-causal reductive view of human agency, paradigmatically embodied in the so‐called standard‐model. This book, by contrast, develops a new agent‐causal solution to these conflicts and shows why this solution is superior both to event‐causalist accounts and to intentionalism about agency. It offers a comprehensive theory of substance-causation on the basis of a realist conception of powers, and a non-causal account of acting for reasons in terms of following a standard of success.