Agency and Self-awareness: Issues in Philosophy and PsychologyJohannes Roessler, Naomi Eilan Leading philosophers and psychologists join forces to investigate a set of problems to do with agency and self-awareness, in seventeen specially written essays. In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. Patients with Anarchic Hand syndrome sometimes find their hands perform apparently goal-directed actions which the patients disown, yet seem to be unable to suppress (for example, reaching out for someone else's food in a restaurant). On the face of it, these patients lack the kind of control and self-awareness we ordinarily take ourselves to have when acting intentionally. Questions raised by this phenomenon include: What is involved in being aware of an action as one's own? What is the nature of the control these patients are lacking and which characterizes normal intentional actions? What is the relation between a priori explanations of consciousness and self-consciousness, on the one hand, and empirical work on the information-processing mechanisms involved in action control, on the other? Questions of action control and self-awareness tend to be treated separately in both philosophy and psychology. The central idea behind this volume is that outstanding unresolved issues on both topics, and in both disciplines, can only be resolved by an interdisciplinary examination of the relations between them. The editors' useful introductory essay offers a guide to cross-disciplinary reading of the contributions, and makes connections between them explicit. |
Contents
Awareness and Ownership of Action | 48 |
Awareness Ownership and Knowledge | 94 |
Conscious Awareness of Intention and of Action | 111 |
A Cognitive | 128 |
The Role of Demonstratives in ActionExplanation | 150 |
Experimental Approaches to Action | 165 |
Perception and Agency | 188 |
The Case | 218 |
The Development of SelfConsciousness | 275 |
Perceiving Intentions | 296 |
An Analogy between | 321 |
The Epistemology of Physical Action | 345 |
On Knowing Ones Own Actions | 358 |
Intentional Action and SelfAwareness | 383 |
407 | |
413 | |
Other editions - View all
Agency and Self-awareness: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology Johannes Roessler,Naomi Eilan Limited preview - 2003 |
Agency and Self-awareness: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology Johannes Roessler,Naomi Eilan No preview available - 2003 |
Common terms and phrases
3-year-olds activity agent Anarchic Hand Anosognosia aspects attention awareness of action behaviour beliefs bereitschaftspotential blindsighted bodily action bodily experience bodily movements body brain Cambridge causal Christopher Peacocke claim codes Cognitive Cognitive Neuropsychology concepts consciousness cortex developmental Developmental Psychology distinction effects epistemological event example execution experimental explain fact first-person frontal lobe function goal grasp green card ideomotor intentional action intentionally introspective involved Jeannerod judgement kind knowledge Libet Marcel mental Moore's paradox motor move normal object observed one's oneself ownership of action Oxford patients perceived perceptual experience performance Perner phenomenology possible processing properties proprioceptive question readiness potential reason relation relevant representation response role seems self-ascription self-awareness sense of agency sense of ownership spatial specific stimulus subpersonal suggest Supplementary Motor Area target task theory of mind tion trying underspecification University Press visual visual perception Zelazo