Markos Valaris

Cognitive agency - the idea that our judgments and beliefs are manifestations of agency on our part - is a deeply entrenched aspect of our self-conception as persons. And yet it has proven hard to give a satisfying account of what such agency might consist in. In this paper I argue that getting clear about Kant’s notion of spontaneity might help us make progress in that debate. In particular, I argue that the very same assumption - namely, that agency must be understood on the model of production - has been holding us back in both areas.

In an intriguing but neglected passage in the Transcendental Deduction, Kant appears to link the synthetic activity of the understanding in experience with the phenomenon of attention (B156-7n). In this paper, we take up this hint, and draw upon Kant's remarks about attention in the Anthropology to shed light on the vexed question of what, exactly, the understanding's role in experience is for Kant. We argue that reading Kant's claims about synthesis in this light allows us to combine two aspects of Kant's views that many commentators have thought are in tension with one another: on the one hand, Kant's apparent commitment to naïve realism about perception and, on the other, his apparent commitment to the necessity of synthetic activity by the understanding for any kind of cognitive contact with external objects.

According to current orthodoxy in the philosophy of action, intentional actions consist in intrinsically mindless bodily movements that stand in causal relations to appropriate mental states. This paper challenges this approach to intentional action, by arguing that there are not enough appropriate mental states around to ‘animate’ all of the bodily movements we intuitively count as intentional actions. In the alternative picture I suggest, the bodily movements that constitute our intentional actions are themselves to be thought of as cognitive events, embodying our grasp of ways of acting

"Divided chronologically into four volumes, The Philosophy of Knowledge: A History presents the history of one of Western philosophy's greatest challenges: understanding the nature of knowledge. Each volume follows conceptions of knowledge that have been proposed, defended, replaced, and proposed anew. Knowledge in Contemporary Philosophy covers discussions about scientific knowledge, social knowledge, and self-knowledge, along with attempts to understand knowledge naturalistically, contextually, and normatively. How did contemporary epistemology begin? What shape is it now in? What future seems to await it? The past hundred or so years have included excitement, puzzlement, and apparent progress within epistemology. This volume conveys much of that philosophical ferment and energy."--Bloomsbury Publishing.