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.
Constantine Sandis is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, Founding Director of Lex Academic and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
List of FiguresPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Actions, Reasons, and EthicsPart I. Action1. Action Cubes and Traces2. What Is It to Do Nothing?3. Are We Superhuman or Are We Dancer? Action and Will in the Novels of Anthony Powell4. Reasoning to Action5. How to Act Against Your Better JudgementPart II. Reasons 6. The Objects of Action Explanation7. Dretske on the Causation of Behaviour8. Verbal Reports and ‘Real Reasons’: Confabulation and Conflation9. Can Action Explanations Ever Be Non-Factive?10. Are Reasons Like Shampoo?Part III. Ethics11. Gods and Mental States: The Causation of Action in Ancient Tragedy and Modern Philosophy of Mind12. Motivated by the Gods: Compartmentalized Agency and Responsibility13. The Man Who Mistook his Handlung for a Tat: Hegel on Oedipus and Other Tragic Thebans14. The Doing and the Deed: Action in Normative Ethics15. Ethics and Action Theory: An Unhappy DivorceAppendix: Basic Actions and IndividuationNotesBibliographyIndex
An engaging and demanding book, richly rewarding attention to detail, keeping up a positive tension throughout the discussions ... The book should be read by everyone invested in philosophy of action, metaethics, moral psychology, normative ethics, and is recommended to all who work in connected fields like social and cognitive psychology, or sociology and history.