Personal Agency

Abstract

Abstract This book has two Parts. Part I prepares the ground for this theory of rational free action by seeking to undermine the threat that physicalism presents to it. This it does this by challenging the cogency of the causal closure argument for physicalism in all of its forms. It shows that a dualistic philosophy of mind — one which holds that human mental states and their subjects cannot simply be identified with bodily states and human bodies respectively — is both metaphysically coherent and entirely consistent with known empirical facts concerning mental causation and causation in the physical domain. Part II defends a middle path between classical agent causalism and volitionism. It accords to volitions the status of basic actions, maintains that these are free and spontaneous exercises of the two-way power of the will, performed in the light of reason, and contends that agents are the causal source of all change in the world — with rational, free agents like ourselves having a special place in the causal order as unmoved movers, or initiators of new causal chains. Rather than accepting the notion of event causation as perfectly legitimate in the inanimate domain and representing agent causation as a sui generis phenomenon restricted to rational beings, in which an agent as such is a cause, it holds that all causation is causation by agents, but that agents can only cause things to happen by acting in suitable ways. And it says that what is special about rational agents is that they possess a distinctively rational power — the power of will or choice. It also defends a thoroughgoing externalism regarding reasons for action, holding these to be mind-independent worldly entities rather than the beliefs and desires of agents.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 379 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.