Essays on the Active Powers of Man

Reid, Thomas

doi:10.1093/oseo/instance.00106526

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“…substances (Reid, 1788; Chisholm, 1976 (1977, 1987). In basic outline, the view identifies laws of nature with certain primitive, contingent, and second-order relations among universals, ones that are specified as satisfying certain theoretical requirements associated with our concept of scientific law, structuring the distribution of event tokens in 9 accordance with certain of their types.…”

Section: Agents As Compositionally Irreducible Substances (Though Posmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some agent causationists have supposed that human persons are simple (partless) substances (Reid, 1788;Chisholm, 1976). But others are quite emphatic that human persons are simply living animals, having no immaterial parts (Richard Taylor, 1966: 134-38;Randolph Clarke 1993: 201, n.14).…”

Section: Agents As Compositionally Irreducible Substances (Though Posmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If this is true of human activity as well, then we do not engage in an ontologically distinctive kind of causation, as the agent causal theory supposes. So the agent causationist requires an ontology on which human persons are not only temporally 7 enduring but also synchronically irreducible substances-entities that are in some robust sense more than the sum of the constituents of their bodies.Some agent causationists have supposed that human persons are simple (partless)substances (Reid, 1788; Chisholm, 1976 (1977, 1987). In basic outline, the view identifies laws of nature with certain primitive, contingent, and second-order relations among universals, ones that are specified as satisfying certain theoretical requirements associated with our concept of scientific law, structuring the distribution of event tokens in 9 accordance with certain of their types.…”

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Agent-Causal Theories of Freedom

O’Connor

2012

The Oxford Handbook of Free Will

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For Oxford Handbook On Free Will, 2 nd ed., R. Kane (ed.) Draft Jan. 25, 2010] This essay will canvass recent philosophical discussion of accounts of human (free) agency that deploy a notion of agent causation. Historically, many accounts have only hinted at the nature of agent causation by way of contrast with the causality exhibited by impersonal physical systems. Likewise, the numerous criticisms of agent causal theories have tended to be highly general, often amounting to no more that the bare assertion that the idea of agent causation is obscure or mysterious. But in the past decade, detailed accounts of agent causation have been offered (chiefly by Randolph Clarke and Timothy O'Connor), and they have occasioned more specific objections in turn.1 These recent accounts and objections to them will be my primary focus in what follows. But first I will identify two distinct motivations that have been advanced for adopting an agent causal approach to human agency and the ontological and metaphysical commitments common to any version of this approach. I Motivations for an Agent Causal Account From the Intractable Difficulties with Giving a Causal Theory of ActionMany action theorists have sought informative necessary and sufficient conditions for a behavior's being an intentional action-something the agent did purposely, not accidentally or reflexively. A common strategy starts from the assumption that psychological states such as desires, beliefs, and perhaps intentions are important and 2 salient antecedent causes of action. This strategy was championed by Donald Davidson (1963) and has been the dominant approach ever since. Nevertheless, soon afterDavidson's essay, a number of authors (Chisholm 1966, Taylor 1966, and Davidson 1980 himself) noticed a serious obstacle to attempts to provide a plausible causal theory. It is easy to conjure up scenarios where one's motivational reasons cause one to perform an action suited to the reasons despite one's not having acted intentionally. Here is Davidson's example:A climber might want to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and he might know that by loosening his hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and danger. This belief and want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen his hold, and yet it might be the case that he never chose to loosen his hold, nor did he do it intentionally. (1980, 79) Here, the climber has a reason for loosening his hold on the rope, and the reason causes him to do so, but in such a way that it is evident that he did not intentionally so act. The way the reason causes the action was of the wrong sort for the action to have been intentional. The challenge for the causal theorist, then, is to say in general terms what the right way consists in. What kinds of causal process between motivating reasons and behavior must occur for the action to be intentional, according to the causal theorist?Some philosophers have held that there can be no good answer to this question, so that the "prob...

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Section: Agents As Compositionally Irreducible Substances (Though Posmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Agents As Compositionally Irreducible Substances (Though Posmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Agent-Causal Theories of Freedom

O’Connor

2012

The Oxford Handbook of Free Will

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“…112 See chapters 4 and 5 and the previous subsection. 113 Reid (1999), essay III, chapter VI (591). Butler's insistence that conscience "carries its own authority with it" was not a viable solution to the problem of the authority of conscience.…”

Section: The Education Of Consciencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…(…) Conscience commands and forbids with more authority (…) without the labour of reasoning. Its voice is heard by every man…"; Reid (1999), essay III, chapter VII: "Of Moral Approbation and Disapprobation", 592, 594. 35 Bentham (2000), 63.…”

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Conscience and Conscientious Objections

Schinkel¹

2007

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Conscience and Conscientious ObjectionsThe publication of this book is made possible by grants from the Blaise Pascal Instituut, the Vrije Universiteit, and the department of Philosophy of the Vrije Universiteit. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. 'No, not as people used to think that God existed.' All one can do is to appeal to certain areas of experience, pointing out certain features, and using suitable metaphors and inventing suitable concepts where necessary to make these features visible." IRIS MURDOCH, "On God and Good" "[I]t seems to me impossible to discuss certain kinds of concept without resort to metaphor, since the concepts are themselves deeply metaphorical and cannot be analysed into non-metaphorical components without a loss of substance. Modern behaviouristic philosophy attempts such an analysis in the case of certain moral concepts, it seems to me without success." IRIS MURDOCH, "The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts" PrefaceThanks are due to many people, without whose support (of whatever kind) I could not have written this book. First of all, I owe many thanks to my parents for the important part they played in the formation of my conscience. The first resource for a philosopher is his own experience. Therefore, it is fortunate (from an academic point of view, at least) that I am not too good a person, in which case I would have had much fewer experiences of conscience to work with; of course it is equally fortunate, for the same reason, that I am not too bad a person. Secondly, special thanks are due to Bert Musschenga, for his sympathetic support and gentle guidance, to my former 'roommates' Govert Buijs and Jos Kole for inspiring and interesting (dissertation-and non-dissertation-related) conversations, to Dick van Lente, Kees Schinkel and Willem Schinkel, for their important and helpful comments in various stages, to Eva Moraal, for listening and for simply being there, and further, for various reasons, to Jonathan Jacobs, Heinz Kittsteiner, Arend Soeteman, and Ben Vermeulen. Thirdly, I would like to thank Nynke Eringa-Boomgaardt for telling me her private story so candidly and for allowing me to use it in my dissertation, as well as the Dutch Minister of Defence for allowing me to make use of conscientious objector files from the Defence Archives. I am grateful to the staff at these archives in Kerkrade, who were extremely helpful. Thanks are due to everyone at Amsterdam University Press, but especially to Patrick Weening, for patiently making one pdf after another. Fourthly, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this book in some other way: Jan Boersema, Jan Branssen, Patrick Delaere, Lasse Gerrits, Michel Heijdra, Lena Hoppe, Dorothee Horstkoet...

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A Companion to Hume

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Essays on the Active Powers of Man

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