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E-book The Shape of Agency : Control, Action, Skill, Knowledge

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Penilaian

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The agent is the one that does things. There somehow in the midst of all the things that cause the agent to move, you find an agent in turn causing things. You find action. The agent displays activity.Those things that are not agents do nothing. There in the midst of all the things that cause them to move and that they in turn cause, you find . . . mere happenings, nothing else. No action; all passivity.—Really?Hogweed is not an agent—not in the sense above intended. And yet hog-weed will give you a nasty rash. Hogweed will render your skin extremely sensitive to the sun. You might end up with third degree burns, and scars. Hogweed does things.Come to think of it, what doesn’t do things? Numbers probably. Absences maybe. But lots of things do things. Trees fall. Stars burn. When passing through heavy water, neutrinos leave a kind of trail.When I say the agent is the one that does things—when I engage in this philosopher’s way of talking about agents—I must have a special notion in mind.At its most metaphorical, the notion is of two planes of existence.On one plane are mere happenings, and the things that partake in them. On this plane festers the hogweed, falls the tree, slowly cools the dead star, bombs quietly across space and time the neutrino.On the higher plane are agents. Doing things. But for real.This picture is gnomic. It frustrates. And yet it allures. The history of philosophical reflection on action gives the distinction between activity and passivity different names, and attempts to explain the distinction in differ-ent ways. But philosophers circle the distinction repeatedly (for a nice recent discussion, see Hyman 2015, both chapter 1 and the appendix). Aristotle wants to know the difference between being cut and cutting. Hobbes wants to know the difference between vital motions, like the motion of the blood, and voluntary motion, as in bodily action. Wittgenstein wants to know the difference between my arm going up and my raising it. I’m hooked. Agents do seem to be importantly distinct from non-agents. Agents seem to be a special kind of thing, possessed of unique capacities and thereby capable of special kinds of achievements.In this book I give voice to this thought. I offer a perspective on agency—on its minimal conditions and some of its exemplary instances.The view of agency built in this book is not exactly reductionist. But it is stripped down. It is individualistic. And it is in large measure, at least in exposition, ahistorical. This is not to say it is not a product of its time. One could trace a lineage that draws significant inspiration from Aristotle, endorses some ideas found in the modern period (in, e.g., Hobbes), then begins to pick up steam with thinkers like William James, and past him diverse mid-twentieth-century sources like Gilbert Ryle, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and from there moves quickly towards the pre-sent, adding and pruning layers like some kind of self-critical Fibonacci sequence, by way of Hector-Neri Castañeda, Alvin Goldman, Marc Jeannerod, Myles Brand, Daniel Dennett, Michael Bratman, Alfred Mele, Elisabeth Pacherie.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

122 SHE t

Penerbit

London : Oxford University Press., 2021

Deskripsi Fisik

209 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780198866411

Klasifikasi

122

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

causation

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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