Action as abductive performance: An improvisational model

Philosophy in review, 2012

In one of his final published papers, Donald Davidson remarks: 'Since it is clear that the concept of action is central to many of the perennial concerns of philosophy, what is surprising is not Aristotle's interest, or ours, but rather the relative neglect of the subject during the intervening millennia… But whatever the reason, the consequence is that the subject has progressed, or changed, relatively little since Aristotle… Our topic has flourished, then, mainly in two periods: Aristotle's and our own' ("Aristotle's Action," Truth, Language and History [Clarendon Press, 2005], 277-8). The first three parts of A Companion to the Philosophy of Action-Part I, "Acts and Actions"; Part II, "Agency and Causation," and Part III, "Action in Special Contexts"testify to the efflorescence of work in the philosophy of action since the second half of the twentieth century. Part IV, "Prominent Figures," which, apart from an opening chapter on classical Indian philosophy, focuses on Western philosophers from Plato to Paul Ricoeur (no living philosophers are treated), might seem to challenge Davidson's historical claim. After limning the main topics treated in the first three parts of the volume, I treat Part IV, which constitutes nearly a third of the volume, at greatest length, and assess whether the historical chapters included there challenge Davidson's claim about the history of the philosophy of action.

Studia Humana, 2017

The concept of Intentional Action is at the core of Praxeology, as developed by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. Under this unique approach, defined as the science of human action and designed to study the field of the social sciences, Mises create "action axiom": the contention that every acting man more satisfactory state of affairs for a Austrian scholar is able to derive the fundament human action; such as value, scale of value, scarcity, abundance, profit, loss, uncertainty and causality, among others. This paper intends to present the praxeological perspective on intentional action and its epistemologic implications; it also attempts to answer objections to this thesis.

2021

Over the years, there has been the contention among some philosophers on the nature of an action. Some argue that for an action to occur, there must be some certain mental dispositions such as willing, volition and the engagement of the mind, in connection with responsibility. As it were, action theory takes care of issues like; freewill, motive, intention, etc., which are of course littered in the writings of Kane. In this light, Kane sustains that an action that responsibility should be accorded is that action that was done with the will of an agent, who is a rational being. This work highlight the ideas of Kane as it refers to action theory themes found therein and thus places him in a particular classification of Action Theories highlighted in philosophy.

European Journal of Philosophy, 2017

Propositionalism in the philosophy of action is the popular view that intentional actions are bodily movements caused and rationalized by certain 'internal' propositional attitude states that constitute the agent's perspective. I attack propositionalism's background claim that the genuinely mental/cognitive dimension of human action resides solely in some range of 'internal' agencyconferring representational states that causally trigger, and thus are always conceptually disentangle-able from, bodily activity itself. My opposing claim, following Ryle, Wittgenstein, and others, is that mentality and intentionality can be constitutively implicated in bodily actions themselves, as exercises of a distinctive form of embodied practical understanding. I attempt to show this by attending to the fine-grained contours of various skillful actions. It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating. Skill does not deliberate.-Aristotle, Physics, II.8, 199b26-8. The fact that I will an action consists in my performing the action, not in my doing something else which causes the action.-Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, 89. Contemporary philosophy of action is in the grip of a misleading picture of human agency. This picture is comprised of several dubious metaphysical claims concerning the nature of commonsense psychological concepts and how these concepts relate to, and rationally explain, our actions. The most fine-grained version of this orthodoxy, what I will call the 'propositional attitude theory of action', or 'propositionalism', for short, construes everyday psychologicalexplanatory discourse about intentions and reasons for action as referring to internal representational mental states-specifically, propositional attitudes-and then claims that actions are bodily motions represented and causally triggered by certain kinds of propositional attitude states. This paper challenges propositionalism's background claim that the intrinsically mental/intentional dimension of human action resides solely in some range of 'inner' representational states that causally trigger, and thus are always conceptually disentangle-able from, 'outer' bodily activity itself. I call this the 'gappy' view of the relation of mentality and bodily action. My opposing claim,

Noûs, 1997

Some actions are "overt": they essentially involve agents' moving their bodies. Others are not: there are mental actions-for example, solving a chess problem in one's head, or deliberating about whether to accept a job offer. According to a popular view, actions are, essentially, events with a suitable causal history, a causal history featuring pertinent mental events or states. This view, if it is correct, helps both with a metaphysical issue and with an explanatory issue in the philosophy of mind. The metaphysical issue is how actions differ from nonactions. The explanatory issue is how actions are to be explained. On one popular view, they are to be explained-causally-partly in terms of such things as beliefs, desires, intentions, and associated mental events (e.g., acquiring an intention to A now). If actions essentially have such items as causes, this view of action-explanation has metaphysical underpinnings.

‘Action and Reflection (I)’ is the first of two studies. The present article focuses on action theory; the sequel will focus on reflection in relation to ‘second-order agency’. Both aim to show the relevance of categories developed in Mouw & Griffioen (1992), Pluralisms and Horizons, in steering clear of the Scylla of ‘methodological individualism’, and the Charybdis of collectivism. The historical survey with which this article starts shows that methodological individualism casts its shadows far beyond Max Weber, its originator. Also, it becomes clear that this position is hard to overcome as ‘communal agency’, its opposite, proves to be fraught with internal problems. In the systematic part the author elaborates an alternative solution by shifting to the communities in which action takes place. Here the categories of context, structure and direction are brought to bear.

Performance art; Art Action; Live art. Some elements to consider and reflect upon at the use of performers and researchers to forward and foster further analytic investigation on the fields. Revisited excerpts from the book: Pagnes, Andrea, The Fall of Faust-Considerations on Contemporary Art and Art Action (Florence, 2010).

Philosophy East and West, 2010

Scholars working in philosophy of action still struggle with the freedom/determinism dichotomy that stretches back to Hellenist philosophy and the metaphysics that gave rise to it. Although that metaphysics has been repudiated in current philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the dichotomy still haunts these fields. As such, action is understood as distinct from movement, or motion. In early China, under a very different metaphysical paradigm, no such distinction is made. Instead, a notion of self-caused movement, or spontaneity, is elaborated. In this article a general conception of spontaneity from early Daoism is explained, detailing its constituent aspects. Similar notions appeared from time to time in Western philosophy, and these instances are pursued, exploring how their instantiations differed from Daoist spontaneity and why. Based on these approximate examples of spontaneity and on early Daoist spontaneity, new criteria are postulated for a plausible theory of action that dispenses with presuppositions that eventuate in a freedom/determinism dichotomy, and instead the possibility is offered of a general model of action that can be applied smoothly across current philosophical and cognitive scientific subdisciplines.

Action in Context, 2007

2007

In the philosophical tradition ever since Aristotle theory of action has been regarded as an essential and indispensable basis of the core disciplines of practical philosophy, which should explain, among others, how prudential rationality, moral behaviour, responsibility, freedom or autonomy are possible. We find such explicit action theory underpinnings of their respective ethics or theories of rationality in Aristotle, in Epicurus, in Stoic philosophy or later, in modern times in Locke, in Hume or, to a minor degree, in Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer to name only a few.