Does action always arise out of desire? G. F. Schueler examines this hotly debated topic in philosophy of action and moral philosophy, arguing that once two senses of "desire" are distinguished - roughly, genuine desires and pro attitudes - apparently plausible explanations of action in terms of the agent's desires can be seen to be mistaken. Desire probes a fundamental issue in philosophy of mind, the nature of desires and how, if at all, they motivate and justify our actions. At (...) least since Hume argued that reason "is and of right ought to be the slave of the passions," many philosophers have held that desires play an essential role both in practical reason and in the explanation of intentional action. G. F. Schueler looks at contemporary accounts of both roles in various belief-desire models of reasons and explanation and argues that the usual belief-desire accounts need to be replaced. Schueler contends that the plausibility of the standard belief-desire accounts rests largely on a failure to distinguish "desires proper," like a craving for sushi, from so-called "pro attitudes," which may take the form of beliefs and other cognitive states as well as desires proper. Schueler's "deliberative model" of practical reasoning suggests a different view of the place of desire in practical reason and the explanation of action. He holds that we can arrive at an intention to act by weighing the relevant considerations and that these may not include desires proper at all. (shrink)

People act for reasons. That is how we understand ourselves. But what is it to act for a reason? This is what Fred Schueler investigates. He rejects the dominant view that the beliefs and desires that constitute our reasons for acting simply cause us to act as we do, and argues instead for a view centred on practical deliberation--our ability to evaluate the reasons we accept. Schueler's account of 'reasons explanations' emphasizes the relation between reasons and purposes, and the fact (...) that the reasons for an action are not always good reasons. (shrink)

Listening to someone from some distance in a crowded room you may experience the following phenomenon: when looking at them speak, you may both hear and see where the source of the sounds is; but when your eyes are turned elsewhere, you may no longer be able to detect exactly where the voice must be coming from. With your eyes again fixed on the speaker, and the movement of her lips a clear sense of the source of the sound will (...) return. This ‘ventriloquist’ effect reflects the ways in which visual cognition can dominate auditory perception. And this phenomenological observation is one what you can verify or disconfirm in your own case just by the slightest reflection on what it is like for you to listen to someone with or without visual contact with them. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that the latter group [of Non-Humeans] is correct. My argument focuses on practical deliberation and has two parts. I will discuss two different problems that arise for the Humean Theory and suggest that while taken individually each problem appears to have a solution, for each problem the solution Humeans offer precludes solving the other problem. I will suggest that to see these difficulties we must take seriously the thought that we can only understand an (...) agent’s reasons for her action by looking at her actual or possible practical deliberation. (shrink)

The phenomenon of probability backflow, previously quantified for a free nonrelativistic particle, is considered for a free particle obeying Dirac's equation. It is shown that probability backflow can occur in the opposite direction to the momentum; that is to say, there exist positive-energy states in which the particle certainly has a positive momentum in a given direction, but for which the component of the probability flux vector in that direction is negative. It is shown that the maximum possible amount of (...) probability that can flow “backwards,” over a given time interval of duration T, depends on the dimensionless parameter ε = (4ℏ/mc2T)1/2, where m is the mass of the particle and c is the speed of light. At ε = 0, the nonrelativistic value of approximately 0.039 for this maximum is recovered. Numerical studies suggest that the maximum decreases monotonically as ε increases from 0, and show that it depends on the size of m, ℏ, and T, unlike the nonrelativistic case. (shrink)