Home | Best Seller | FAQ | Contact Us
Browse
Art & Photography
Biographies & Autobiography
Body,Mind & Health
Business & Economics
Children's Book
Computers & Internet
Cooking
Crafts,Hobbies & Gardening
Entertainment
Family & Parenting
History
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Detective
Nonfiction
Professional & Technology
Reference
Religion
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports & Outdoors
Travel & Geography
   Book Info

enlarge picture

Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays  
Author: Gary Watson
ISBN: 019927228X
Format: Handover
Publish Date: June, 2005
 
     
     
   Book Review

Book Description
Since the 1970s Gary Watson has published a series of brilliant and highly influential essays on human action, examining such questions as: in what ways are we free and not free, rational and irrational, responsible or not for what we do? Moral philosophers and philosophers of action will welcome this collection, representing one of the most important bodies of work in the field.




Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Since the 1970s Gary Watson has published a series of highly influential essays on human action. Agency and Answerability collects eleven of these papers, concerned mainly with two intersecting questions. First, what makes us agents: individuals whose lives are attributable to them as something they (in part) conduct, not just as something that occurs? And second, what makes us responsible to one another for how we carry out our lives? Watson's answer to both questions appeals to a single notion: the capacity for critical evaluation, or 'normative competence'. We are agents because (and insofar as) we shape our lives by the exercise of normative intelligence; we are answerable to interpersonal norms of criticism because our lives are (in part) reflections of this capacity. The essays are therefore preoccupied with possible sources of normative incapacitation. Some challenges to our responsible agency emerge only from abstract philosophical reflection -- for example, on the possibility that human activity is subject to causal explanation. Others are forced upon us in daily life by our encounters with such phenomena as addiction, manipulation, and childhood deprivation. The essays explore, in particular, how freedom and responsibility might be diminished by our own desires, as in weakness of will or compulsion. This possibility raises questions about the role of the will in responsibility. Moral philosophers and philosophers of action will welcome this collection, representing one of the most important bodies of work in the field.

     



Home | Private Policy | Contact Us
@copyright 2001-2005 ReadingBee.com