Philosophy of Mind Workshop 2007-01-25

David Velleman, The Possibility of Practical Reason, "Introduction" (Part I)

At the end of last meeting, David suggested that we read the introduction to Velleman's The Possibility of Practical Reason to wrap up our discussion of Velleman, since he thought it would provide the best view of the position as a whole and maybe answer some of the questions that have been raised over the past quarter about Velleman's view of action. So we read it, and tonight we met to discuss it. As one might expect, Jason gave a very clear and incisive introduction to Velleman's "introduction", and raised some worries about it. Velleman is interested in answering the following question: given an event, and an agent, what makes it the case that the event is an action of the agent? More specifically, he's interested in a constitutive, non-circular answer to that question. Jason noted that thinking that question ...

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