An Account of Luck
in Hard Luck
July 2011; published online September 2011.
Chapter. Subjects: metaphysics. 13611 words.
This chapter develops an account of luck. It claims that there are two species of luck, which it calls chancy and non-chancy luck. The first kind is the kind that is usually at issue when events are...
Action
in Philosophy
Published online May 2011.
Article. Subjects: philosophy; aesthetics and philosophy of art; epistemology; feminist philosophy; history of Western philosophy; metaphysics; moral philosophy; non-Western philosophy; philosophy of language; philosophy of law; philosophy of mathematics and logic; philosophy of mind; philosophy of religion; philosophy of science; social and political philosophy. 6260 words.
The philosophy of action shares with its topic a certain uncertainty of location. Is action located inside the mind or outside the mind—or does it in some way belong to both domains...
Action and its Explanation
May 2003; published online October 2011.
Book. Subjects: metaphysics. 252 pages.
This book pursues some novel and unusual standpoints in the philosophy of action. It rejects, for example, the most widely held view about how to count actions, and argues for what it calls a...
Action as Settling: Some Objections
in A Metaphysics for Freedom
March 2012; published online May 2012.
Chapter. Subjects: metaphysics. 15400 words.
This chapter explores some possible objections to the idea that actions are agents’ settlings of hitherto unsettled questions—and considers the case for a deflationary compatibilist understanding of...
Active Control and Causation
in Libertarian Accounts of Free Will
October 2003; published online January 2005.
Chapter. Subjects: metaphysics. 7114 words.
Noncausal libertarian accounts allow that a basic free action may be uncaused and have no internal causal structure. Views of this type advanced by Carl Ginet and Hugh McCann are evaluated here....
Activity and Passivity in Reflective Agency1
in Oxford Studies in Metaethics
June 2011; published online September 2011.
Chapter. Subjects: metaphysics. 16584 words.
Many philosophers maintain that there is a distinction between acts that the agent plays an active role in producing, and acts that issue from the agent in a more passive fashion. According to the...
Actualism and Possible Worlds
in Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality
May 2003; published online November 2003.
Chapter. Subjects: metaphysics. 8442 words.
In this essay, I defend the compatibility of actualism – i.e., the view that there neither are, nor could have been, any nonexistent objects – and possible worlds. I begin by demonstrating how on the...
Actuality
in Powers
November 2006; published online October 2011.
Chapter. Subjects: metaphysics. 1037 words.
This chapter briefly discusses actuality and some objections to this concept. It quotes David Hume, who says that manifested powers are identical with their manifestations. Another defence of...
Actuality
in Worlds and Individuals, Possible and Otherwise
December 2009; published online February 2010.
Chapter. Subjects: metaphysics. 5711 words.
The notion of things being actually thus-and-so (actual so-sein) is primitive. The actual world is a world at which things are actually a certain way. ‘Actually’, ‘presently’, and ‘here’ function...
Actuality, Activity, Ambiguity: Preliminary Considerations on Energeia
in Doing and Being
October 2009; published online February 2010.
Chapter. Subjects: metaphysics. 6551 words.
In the sixth chapter of Metaphysics Theta, Aristotle resumes direct engagement with the science of being, as such. The entire text up to this point has been preparatory. He now undertakes, first, to...