Over the course of the last 15 years, Constantine Sandis has advanced our understanding of the role that action plays in shaping our moral thought. In this collection of his best essays in the philosophy of action, Sandis brings together updated versions of his writings, accompanied by a new introduction. Read collectively they demonstrate the breadth of his interests and ability to relate to broader issues within the culture, connecting debates in philosophical psychology about motivation, negligence, and moral responsibility with Greek tragedy, social psychology and literature.
Along this path from action to ethics, Sandis engages with Hegel, Wittgenstein, Anscombe, Ricoeur, Davidson, and Dretske, together with contemporary authors such as Jennifer Hornsby and Jonathan Dancy. As he responds to each thinker and theme, he develops his own philosophical position, the key thesis of which is that philosophy of action without ethics is empty, ethics without philosophy of action is blind.
List of Figures
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Actions, Reasons, and Ethics
Part I. Action
1. Action Cubes and Traces
2. What Is It to Do Nothing?
3. Are We Superhuman or Are We Dancer? Action and Will in the Novels of Anthony Powell
4. Reasoning to Action
5. How to Act Against Your Better Judgement
Part II. Reasons
6. The Objects of Action Explanation
7. Dretske on the Causation of Behaviour
8. Verbal Reports and ‘Real Reasons’: Confabulation and Conflation
9. Can Action Explanations Ever Be Non-Factive?
10. Are Reasons Like Shampoo?
Part III. Ethics
11. Gods and Mental States: The Causation of Action in Ancient Tragedy and Modern Philosophy of Mind
12. Motivated by the Gods: Compartmentalized Agency and Responsibility
13. The Man Who Mistook his Handlung for a Tat: Hegel on Oedipus and Other Tragic Thebans
14. The Doing and the Deed: Action in Normative Ethics
15. Ethics and Action Theory: An Unhappy Divorce
Appendix: Basic Actions and Individuation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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