Philosophy of Agency
22,411 Followers
Recent papers in Philosophy of Agency
Bajo el término "Epistemología de virtudes" se dan cita un conjunto de posiciones cuyo denominador común es la sustitución de una concepción pasiva del sujeto de conocimiento por una concepción activa del mismo. Esto quiere decir, por una... more
Thinking posthumanly – from a post-Enlightenment, critical, new materialist perspective – things, including concepts, become more permeable and topological – they leak and stretch. Freed from limiting notions of agency, things behave.... more
In the context of the free will debate, both compatibilists and event-causal libertarians consider that the age t s mental states and events are what directly causes her de isio to a t. Ho e er, a ordi g to the disappeari g age t o je tio... more
Er is de laatste jaren veel aandacht voor hoe verslaving de hersenen verandert, en hoe dit self-control beinvloedt. Bij self-control ligt de nadruk vaak ‘control’, maar het ‘self’ aspect is minstens even doorslaggevend in hoe we ons... more
This reflection essay was commissioned by Mount St. Mary's University in 2001, and examines some conceptual overlap between two generically bending and historically separated texts, Shakespeare's much discussed play "The Merchant of... more
This (preprint) chapter argues that the 'thick' constructivism to which many prominent Feminist Security Studies authors currently subscribe is incapable of providing this sub-field of International Relations with adequate philosophical... more
The theory of agency has found applications across the social sciences as well as in management fields; there are literally thousands of papers that employ it. Unlike many popular theoretical approaches in social science, however, the... more
In my talk, I will present key ideas of my four-year research project "Bio-Agency and Natural Freedom" which aims to defeat free will scepticism on a fresh metaphysical basis informed by biology. I will proceed from the diagnosis that a... more
Adaptive control in the face of uncertainty involves making online predictions about events in order to plan actions to reliably achieve desirable outcomes. However, we often face situations in which the effects of our actions are... more
https://towardsdatascience.com/data-smoothing-for-data-science-visualization-the-goldilocks-trio-part-1-867765050615 Making peace with piecewise. We've all heard that information is beautiful. But then life happens, and we find... more
Although European travelers to the Ottoman Empire often noted the inhabitants’ “fatalism,” historians have never seriously examined this intellectual phenomenon. Whether or not we can credit such sources, the testimony of seventeenth- and... more
In Holocaust fiction, narrated children act as catalysts for adult behaviour, which reinstates agency and thus responsibility in the persecuted and largely powerless adults. Since child figures help reclaim an ethical dimension for human... more
1. On Haltung; 2. Approaching Brecht and Agency; 3. Emotions Are Not Split from Cognition; 4. Emotions Intertwining with Haltung as Basis for Acting
The emerging field of Normative Multi-Agent Systems has the twin goals of providing tools for simulating human societies and coordinating activities among heterogenous autonomous software agents in an open environment. Norms are... more
The objective of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of the Kantian notion of freedom (especially the problem of the third antinomy and its resolution in the critique of pure reason); its significance in the... more
*Winner of 2011 Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology* "In this article, I examine the framing of personal agency in Tzotzil Maya dream narrative. Drawing on contemporary linguistic, psychodynamic, and... more
In an effort to carve a distinct place for social facts without lapsing into a holistic ontology, John Greenwood has sought to define social phenomena solely in terms of the attitudes held by the actor(s) in question. I argue that his... more
This book explores the moral psychology of devotion. In the first part of the book, I provide I analysis of devotion; an examination of its motivational role; and an explanation of its connection to a distinctive form of valuing, in which... more
The Library of Nonhuman Books centres around a custom-made reading-machine which uses machine-learning to abridge and ‘artificially illuminate’ physical books through a combination of algorithmic interpretation and digital palimpsest.... more
Drawing on John Dewey’s discussion of habit in Human Nature and Conduct and Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion of the “adventurer” in The Ethics of Ambiguity, I argue that while some of our relations with things and people may very well be... more
The book introduces Tadeusz Kotarbiński’s philosophy of action into the mainstream of contemporary action-theoretical debates. Piotr Makowski shows that Kotarbiński–Alfred Tarski’s teacher and one of the most important philosophers of the... more
It was long assumed that thinking goes on ‘in the head’: indeed, as recently as twenty years ago, many would have regarded it as absurd to examine thinking with reference to events beyond the brain. The chapters in Cognition beyond the... more
"Carter's music poses struggles of opposition, for instance in timbre (Double Concerto), space (String Quartet No. 3) or pulse (String Quartet No. 5). His preference for the all-interval tetrachords, 4–Z15 [0, 1, 4, 6] and 4–Z29 [0, 1, 3,... more
Much of the literature on the desirability of immortality (inspired by B. Williams) has considered whether the goods of mortal life would be exhausted in an immortal life (whether, i.e., immortality would necessarily end in tedium).... more
Both the cause and the solution to environmental crisis are parsed in terms that seem intrinsically to sponsor rejection of notions of autonomy. At the level of metaphysics and of ethics, a discourse of human autonomy is generally seen... more
Prophecy becomes interpreted as a revelation from a deity to a prophet. The nature of Martin Heidegger's work deals with Being and one major component in his book Being and Time is about the freedom that Dasein holds. From this freedom,... more
In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the Cartesian proof of the external world sheds light on some vexatious questions concerning his theory of sense perception. Three main points emerge from the discussion: a picture of... more
The conviction underlying this book is that if we accept vulnerability as a dominant condition of contemporary life, then we should question the philosophical image that understands vulnerability as the negativity of a so-called full... more
The action sequences in Michael Bay’s Transformers series present impossible spaces. Instead of spatially orienting the spectator, these films aim for a maximum of action, a cacophony of movement where space once was. Bay states that he... more
The need to tackle the discrepancy between research outputs and the execution of the findings into real practice is a crucial factor in establishing evidence-based practice in a selected government agency. There is a need to increase the... more
Panel 1 - Critique of history and history of critique with Christian Garland, Harry Cross & Matt Bolton
British Sociological Association (BSA), Durham University, 20th September 2017
British Sociological Association (BSA), Durham University, 20th September 2017
Everyday experience indicates that when we reason intelligently about how to craft a democratic process, which treats persons as "free and equal," we reason about procedures, virtues, and cultural practices in conjunction. This suggests... more
This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot... more
Please do not quote from proofs. For final version see New Essays on The Explanation of Action (ed. C. Sandis), Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp.358-385
В книге предложена логико-когнитивная формализованная теория аргументации, предназначенная для моделирования трех видов аргументации – обоснования, убеждения и практической аргументации. Аргументация – это интеллектуальная познавательная... more
According to contemporary hierarchical views of the self and agency, the distinctive feature of human agency is that we have the ability to distance ourselves from our immediate desires (Frankfurt) and from those socially prescribed norms... more
Discusses modes of moral agency of historical figures such as Hannibal and Julian of Norwich, and tries to locate Hamlet as a moral agent, looking at work by Michael Bristol, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Richard Strier, and Peter Holbrook.