Abstract

The general theme of this book is action, so I begin by contrasting two past approaches to action. The first accepts the arena of common sense: the arena in which the term “action” had its first use—and it focuses on what is available in that arena by virtue of the deployment of our rational awareness toward the prima facie level of action. This approach does not feel obliged to regard what is found in that prima facie level as phenomenal. The telic nature of action, for instance, is accepted as what it purports to be rather than taken as something that needs to be explained and even explained away. The ontology of this approach is one of entities/beings that act, and actions are given an explanatory value, as when, for instance, we ascribe some scientific discovery or some work of art to the action of some scientist or artist. This approach is compatible with the ancient notion that, as causes, rational agents are rooted in a transcendent causal/formative power. The other approach, of which analytic action theory is a case in point, regards supposed rational acts as something that awaits explanation by the methods of science or by such philosophical methods as take science as their guide. Most of its practitioners incline toward this or that version of reductionism. Thus, although action theorists regard prima facie intentions, volitions, and the like as an important way of distinguishing actions from other kinds of events, they tend to suppress the telic aspect of an intention in favor of a causal account in which the intention is regarded as an event that stands at the start of a linked series of events understood in terms of efficient causality; and in which the mental aspect of the intention is dismissed by making it identical with, epiphenomenal upon, supervenient upon, or realized in some physical event or events.