Abstract
The first part of this chapter is concerned with three rival theories of action. Each theory conceives of an action as an event or process in time, or as an aggregate of such events and processes; and each conceives of an action as adequately individuated by virtue of its causes and effects. I shall argue that, if a metaphysical commitment to events is accepted, no one of the theories is clearly preferable to the others. This is a surprising result, since the theories are espoused by philosophers as diverse in orientation as H. A. Prichard, Donald Davidson and R. G. Collingwood. In the last section of the chapter I argue that a metaphysical commitment to events is actually questionable and that, if it is rejected, a theory of agents must be accepted as clearly preferable to any theory that is explicitly concerned with actions and attempts to specify the conditions of their identity.
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Notes
See Ludwig Wittgetstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. Anscombe (Oxford, 1953), I, sec. 621; and David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. II, sect. III.
H. A. Prichard, ‘Acting, Willing, and Desiring’, in Prichard, Moral Obligation (Oxford, 1945), pp. 89–98. Reprinted in A. R. white, The Philosophy of Action (Oxford, 1968), pp. 59–69. My references in the text are to the reprint in White.
P. J. Fitzgerald, ‘Voluntary and Involuntary Acts’ in A. G. Guest (ed.), Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence (Oxford, 1961), pp. 1–28. Reprinted in White, pp. 120–143. The quote passage occurs on p. 126 of White.
J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses’, in Philosophical Papers (Oxford, 1961 ), p. 149.
Donald Davidson, ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes,’ Journal of Philosophy 69 (1963), 685–700. Reprinted in White, pp. 79–94.
See H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honore, Causation and the Law (Oxford, 1959), Ch. 1.
R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford, 1940 ), p. 296.
Davidson, ‘Agency’, in Robert Binkley et al., Agent, Action, and Reason (Toronto, 1971), pp. 3–25.
see Alvin Goldman, A Theory of Human Action ( Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970 ), p. 2.
See Usrael Scheffler, The Anatomy of Inquiry (New York, 1963), pp. 55–76.
Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Fatalism and Determinism’, in Keith Lehrer (ed.), Freedom and Determinism(New York, 1966 ), p. 159.
See R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan (Oxford, 1942 ), pp. 97f.
See Rudolf Carnap, ‘Two concepts of Probability’, in H. Feigi and W. Sellars (eds.), Reading in Philosophycal Analysis (New York, 1949 ), p. 330.
See Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (London, 1946), p. 288.
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© 1977 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Aune, B. (1977). Theories of Action. In: Reason and Action. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1271-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1271-3_1
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