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8Review of The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (review)Essays in Philosophy 7 (1): 126-128. 2006.
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8Review of Philosophy of History: A Guide for Students, by M.C. Lemon (review)Essays in Philosophy 8 (2): 344-345. 2007.
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109Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Action (edited book)Blackwell. 2010.A Companion to the Philosophy of Action offers a comprehensive overview of the issues and problems central to the philosophy of action. * The first volume to survey the entire field of philosophy of action (the central issues and processes relating to human actions) * Brings together specially commissioned chapters from international experts * Discusses a range of ideas and doctrines, including rationality, free will and determinism, virtuous action, criminal responsibility, Attribut…Read more
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36Hegel on PurposeHegel Bulletin 40 (3): 444-463. 2019.In this paper we propose a new interpretation of Hegel's views on action and responsibility, defending it against its most plausible exegetical competitors.1Any exposition of Hegel will face both terminological and substantive challenges, and so we place, from the outset, some interpretative constraints. The paper divides into two parts. In part one, we point out that Hegel makes a number of distinctions which any sensible account of responsibility should indeed make. Our aim here is to show tha…Read more
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Human Nature: Volume 70 (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2012.An understanding of human nature has been central to the work of some of the greatest philosophical thinkers including Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hobbes, Rousseau, Freud and Marx. Questions such as 'what is human nature?', 'is there such a thing as an exclusively human nature?', 'through what methods might we best discover more about our nature?', and 'to what extent are our actions and beliefs constrained by it?' are of central importance not only to philosophy, but to our general understanding of…Read more
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14Against principlesThe Forum. 2017.Constantine Sandis argues for a holistic approach to museums.
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46Making Ourselves Understood: Wittgenstein and Moral EpistemologyWittgenstein-Studien 10 (1): 241-259. 2019.Wittgenstein teaches us that, contrary to current philosophical and scientific trends, the understanding of others is not to be achieved through some kind of emotional tool providing an access-pass to otherwise hidden ‘mental contents’. This insight goes against the popular grain of empathy as a form of informational ‘mindreading’, founded upon John Locke’s assumption that understanding another is a matter of obtaining and decoding the stored in their mind. We would do best to replace this radic…Read more
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498“Music to the Ears of Weaklings”: Moral Hydraulics and the Unseating of DesireManuscrito 41 (4): 71-112. 2018.Psychological eudaimonism is the view that we are constituted by a desire to avoid the harmful. This entails that coming to see a prospective or actual object of pursuit as harmful to us will unseat our positive evaluative belief about that object. There is more than one way that such an 'unseating' of desire may be caused on an intellectualist picture. This paper arbitrates between two readings of Socrates' 'attack on laziness' in the Meno, with the aim of constructing a model of moral educatio…Read more
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26The Man Who Mistook his Handlung for a Tat: Hegel on Oedipus and Other Tragic ThebansHegel Bulletin 31 (2): 35-60. 2010.Throughout his work Hegel distinguishes between the notion of an act from the standpoint of the agent and that of all other standpoints. He terms the formerHandlung and the latterTat. This distinction should not be confused with the contemporary one between action andmerebodily movement. For one, bothHandlungandTatare aspects of conduct that results from the will,viz. Tun. Moreover, Hegel's taxonomy is motivated purely by concerns relating to modes of perception. So whereas theorists such as Don…Read more
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Alasdair MacIntyre, The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays (Vol. 1)Philosophy in Review 28 (1): 49. 2008.
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61The Doing and the Deed: Action in Normative EthicsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 80 105-126. 2017.This essay is motivated by the thought that the things we do are to be distinguished from our acts of doing them. I defend a particular way of drawing this distinction before proceeding to demonstrate its relevance for normative ethics. Central to my argument is the conviction that certain ongoing debates in ethical theory begin to dissolve once we disambiguate the two concepts of action in question. If this is right, then the study of action should be accorded a far more prominent place within …Read more
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37Wittgenstein and Communication Technology – A Conversation between Richard Harper and Constantine SandisPhilosophical Investigations 41 (2): 241-262. 2018.This paper documents a conversation between a philosopher and a human computer interaction researcher whose research has been enormously influenced by Wittgenstein. In particular, the in vivo use of categories in the design of communications and AI technologies are discussed, and how this meaning needs to evolve to allow creative design to flourish. The paper will be of interest to anyone concerned with philosophical tools in everyday action.
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32Period and Place: Collingwood and Wittgenstein on Understanding OthersCollingwood and British Idealism Studies 22 (1): 167-193. 2016.
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29New essays on the explanation of action * by Constantine sandis (review)Analysis 70 (1): 193-196. 2010.The anthology contains twenty-two essays and is divided into two parts. The essays are, in the main, critical responses to aspects of what has come to be known in action theory as the ‘Standard View’ – the view that traces back to Donald Davidson's contribution to twentieth-century philosophy of action. The view under criticism treats actions as bodily movements caused in a non-deviant way by belief–desire pairs, construes these belief–desire pairs as the primary reasons for the actions that the…Read more
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1From Anticausalism to Causalism and BackIn Giuseppina D'Oro & Constantine Sandis (eds.), Reasons and Causes: Causalism and Non-causalism in the Philosophy of Action, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 7-48. 2013.