Constantine Sandis

Two tales of one city: cultural understanding and the Parthenon sculptures

In two recent articles (‘The whole world in our hands’, Guardian, 24 July 2004 and ‘Britain can export cultural diplomacy to the world’, Financial Times, 23 February 2005), British Museum Director,...

The Man Who Mistook his Handlung for a Tat: Hegel on Oedipus and Other Tragic Thebans

Throughout his work Hegel distinguishes between the notion of an act (Tun) from the standpoint of the agent (behaviour in so far as it relates to ones own foreknowledge, purpose, intention, and knowledge) and that of all other standpoints (e.g. legal, scientific, cultural, etc.). He terms the former Handlung (action) and the latter Tat (deed). This distinction should not be confused with the contemporary one between action and mere bodily movement. For one, both Handlung and Tat are aspects of conduct that results from the will, viz. Tun (LA 1160ff.). Moreover, Hegels taxonomy is motivated purely by concerns relating to modes of perception. So whereas theorists such as Donald Davidson assert that all actions are events that are intentional under some description, Hegel reserves the term ‘action’ for those aspects of behaviour that are highlighted by a specific (albeit contested) set of agent-related descriptions. This is not an ontological category, since there are no such objects as actions-under-specific-descriptions (see Anscombe 1979).Sophocless Theban Trilogy reveals the central role that these notions must play in any Hegelian understanding of tragic drama. Indeed the contrasts that matter most to Hegels general take on both epic and tragic poetry are more closely related to the study of action than the standard theory attributed to Hegel would seem to allow. It is more fruitful, then, to incorporate Hegels insights into such tragedies to the model of action employed by him than it is to try to make them fit whatever ‘theory’ of tragedy might appear to be hinted at in his Aesthetics.

Hume and the Debate on 'Motivating Reasons'

This essay offers a new interpretation of Hume’s account of motivation before relating it to certain disputes in modern moral psychology. The essay is divided into three parts. First, I lay down some general distinctions in the so-called theory of motivation (TOM), introducing two related but distinct ongoing debates. Next, in the middle and largest parts of the essay, I focus on what Hume has to say on these matters, concluding that the standard map of available positions leaves no space for his view, as it rejects an assumption shared by all concerned. Finally, I demonstrate how the disputes most central to the debates we began with evaporate once we follow Hume in rejecting this shared assumption, taking this to count in his favour.

Kant and Hegel on purposive action

This essay discusses Kant and Hegel’s philosophies of action and the place of action within the general structure of their practical philosophy. We begin by briefly noting a few things that both unite and distinguish the two philosophers. In the sections that follow, we consider these and their corollaries in more detail. In so doing, we map their differences against those suggested by more standard readings that treat their accounts of action as less central to their practical philosophy. Section 2 discusses some central Kantian concepts (Freedom, Willkür, Wille, and Moral Law). In Section 3, we take a closer look at the distinction between internal and external action, as found in Kant’s philosophy of morality and legality. In Section 4, we turn to Hegel and his distinctions between abstract right (legality), morality, and ethical life, as well as the location of his account of action within his overall theory of morality. We discuss the distinction between Handlung and Tat, and non-imputable consequences. The overall aims of our essay are to shed light on some puzzles in Kant and Hegel’s conceptions and to examine where their exact disputes lie without taking a stand on which philosophy is ultimately the most satisfactory.

Philosophy of Action from Suarez to Anscombe

Accounts of human and animal action have been central to modern philosophy from Suarez and Hobbes in the 1500s, to Wittgenstein and Anscombe in the mid-twentieth century via (among many others) Locke, Hume, Reid, Kant, and Hegel. Philosophies of action have thus greatly influenced the course of both moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind. This volume gathers together specialists from both the philosophy of action and the history of philosophy with the aim of re-assessing the wider philosophical impact of action theory. It thereby explores how different notions of action, agency, reasons for action, motives, intention, purpose, and volition have affected modern philosophical understandings of topics as diverse as those of human nature, mental causation, responsibility, free will, moral motivation, rationality, normativity, choice and decision theory, criminal liability, weakness of will, and moral and social obligation. In so doing, it aims to both understand contemporary questions in the philosophy of action by tracing their development across half a millennium, and to re-interpret modern philosophy through the lens of action theory (but see Zielinska’s essay for scepticism concerning the latter possibility). The form and contents have grown organically out of the Philosophical Accounts of Action 1500–2000 conference that took place at Chancellor’s Hall, Senate House, University of London, 16th–17th May 2013. I organised this under the auspices of The Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, as the result of a bid that won their annual conference competition for 2012/2013 on the theme “Philosophy 1500–2000”. The conference was further supported by a large grant from The Mind Association. I would like to express my gratitude to both institutions, as well as to Julian Dodd, Ali Shahrar, and Barry Smith for their massive organisational help. Many thanks also to the anonymous referees who offered helpful comments on individual papers, as well as on the volume as a whole. What follows is not, however, a publication of the conference proceedings. Numerous additions and amendments have been made, with the aim of offering a more rounded picture of the philosophy of action during this period than was feasible at a two-day conference in the UK. That said, it has been impossible to represent every philosopher since 1500 who had something interesting to say about action, including some of my personal favourites. With this in mind, I have strategically refrained from commissioning essays on some of the more recent theorists who had previously made it into the historical section of A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, which I co-edited with Timothy O’Connor (WileyBlackwell, 2010), namely Sartre, von Wright, and Ricoeur. The main impetus behind this shift was to avoid biasing the volume too heavily towards the twentieth century. For this reason, and not without agent regret, there is also little mention of Arendt, Austin, Danto, Davidson, Frankfurt, Heidegger, Marx, Merleau-Ponty, Oakshott, Prichard, Ross, and others, most of whom were covered in Reasons and Causes, which I co-edited with Giuseppina D’Oro in 2013, on the 50th anniversary of Davidson’s famous article. Instead, the present volume finds new space for thinkers who were largely absent from that publication, including Cavendish, Collingwood, Conway, Fichte, Kotarbiński,

If an Artwork Could Speak: Aesthetic Understanding After Wittgenstein

This chapter allies Bob Dylan with Wittgenstein to argue that Lockean approaches to understanding systematically neglect crucial aspects of our experience of art. Pace Rush Rhees, I maintain that understanding art is not a matter of knowing ideas. If this were so all art would be unhappily rendered into conceptual art.

The Skin in the Game as a Risk Filter

Standard economic theory makes an allowance for the agency problem, but not the compounding of moral hazard in the presence of informational opacity, particularly in what concerns high-impact events in fat tailed domains (under slow convergence for the law of large numbers). Nor did it look at exposure as a filter that removes nefarious risk takers from the system so they stop harming others. red (In the language of probability, skin in the game creates an absorbing state for the agent, not just the principal). But the ancients did; so did many aspects of moral philosophy. We propose a global and morally mandatory heuristic that anyone involved in an action which can possibly generate harm for others, even probabilistically, should be required to be exposed to some damage, regardless of context. While perhaps not sufficient, the heuristic is certainly necessary hence mandatory. It is supposed to counter redvoluntary and involuntary risk hiding - and risk transfer - in the tails.

One Fell Swoop : Small Red Book Historicism Before and After Davidson

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Constantine Sandis, ‘One Fell Swoop: Small Red Book Historicism Before and After Davidson’, Journal of the Philosophy of History, Vol. 9 (3): 372-392, 2015. The Version of Record is available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/18722636-12341308.

The Structure of Agential Explanation

We have seen how philosophers disagree about both the ontology of agential reasons and whether or not explanations in terms of them are causal. They almost unanimously assume, however, that agential reasons are alone capable of explaining why we act. After all, we are reminded, we can be said to act because of them. Thus, for example, Kieran Setiya writes: [T]aking something as one’s reason, in acting on it, is taking it as an explanatory reason, taking it to be a reason that explains one’s action (Setiya 2007: 23).

Conflation in Action

So far, I have argued that most theorists typically conflate three distinct conceptions of behaviour (a–c). That is to say, they write as if the term ‘behaviour’ simultaneously refers to at least two (if not all three) of these. Occasionally one might give explicit expression to such a conflating view. Typically, however, it – and all the other conflating views described in this chapter and throughout the book – are to be attributed to their holders by inference to the best explanation of why they explicitly hold various other views and/or are engaged in certain debates that seem to presuppose the conflation in question. Let us call the view which maintains that this is actually so the Conflating View of Behaviour (CVB): A person’s behaviour consists of the things she does: e.g. the movings of her body.