Agency and Self-awareness: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology

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Johannes Roessler, Naomi Eilan
Clarendon Press, 2003 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 415 pages
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
Author Index
407
Subject Index
413

The Development of Young Childrens Action
244
Comment
263

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