Action

Professor Brown in this volume discusses one of the most difficult questions in metaphysics, “what is action?” His analysis proceeds along three main lines of thought: the point of view of the agent, the primacy of inanimate action, and the pervasiveness of explanatory insight in the description of action. In the spirit of recent work on practical reasoning, he takes the central fact about human action to be the existence of the point of view, and considers the agent’s relation to his own b...