-
33Intentional action without knowledgeSynthese 199 (1-2): 1231-1243. 2020.In order to be doing something intentionally, must one know that one is doing it? Some philosophers have answered yes. Our aim is to test a version of this knowledge thesis, what we call the Knowledge/awareness Thesis, or KAT. KAT states that an agent is doing something intentionally only if he knows that he is doing it or is aware that he is doing it. Here, using vignettes featuring skilled action and vignettes featuring habitual action, we provide evidence that, in various scenarios, a majorit…Read more
-
32Outcomes of Internal Conflicts in the Sphere of Akrasia and Self-ControlIn Peter Baumann & Monika Betzler (eds.), Practical Conflicts: New Philosophical Essays, Cambridge University Press. pp. 262. 2004.Practical conflicts include conflicts in agents who judge, from the perspective of their own values, desires, beliefs, and the like, that one prospective course of action is superior to another but are tempted by what they judge to be the inferior course of action. A man who wants a late-night snack, even though he judges it best, from the identified perspective, to abide by his recent New Year's resolution against eating such snacks until he has lost ten pounds, is the locus of a practical conf…Read more
-
32Free Will and LuckOxford University Press USA. 2006.Mele's ultimate purpose in this book is to help readers think more clearly about free will. He identifies and makes vivid the most important conceptual obstacles to justified belief in the existence of free will and meets them head on. Mele clarifies the central issue in the philosophical debate about free will and moral responsibility, criticizes various influential contemporary theories about free will, and develops two overlapping conceptions of free will - one for readers who are convinced t…Read more
-
32Chance, choice and freedomThe Philosophers' Magazine 55 (55): 61-65. 2011.What does the idea that you could have done something else at the time come to? According to some philosophers, it comes to this: in a hypothetical universe that has exactly the same past as our universe and exactly the same laws of nature, you do something else at this very time.
-
32On a Disappearing Agent Argument: Settling MattersThe Journal of Ethics. forthcoming.This paper is a critique of the current version of Derk Pereboom’s “disappearing agent argument” against event-causal libertarianism. Special attention is paid to a notion that does a lot of work in his argument—that of settling which decision occurs (of the various decisions it is open to the agent to make at the time). It is argued that Pereboom’s disappearing agent argument fails to show that event-causal libertarians lack the resources to accommodate agents’ having freedom-level control over…Read more
-
31Manipulated Agents: PrécisCriminal Law and Philosophy 15 (2): 249-253. 2020.This précis kicks off an invited symposium on Alfred R. Mele.
-
31Practical Mistakes and Intentional ActionsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 43 (3). 2006.Sometimes we forget to do what we intended to do. For example, we intend to buy some milk on the way home from work, but we forget and drive home, as usual. In situations of this kind, what do we do unintentionally and what do we do intentionally? That is this article's guiding question.
-
30Jonathan. Adler, Belief's Own Ethics.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. 357. (review)Ethics 114 (1): 156-158. 2003.A book review of Jonathan Adler's Belief's Own Ethics.
-
28Free will: an opinionated guideOxford University Press. 2022.What did you do a moment ago? What will you do after you read this? Are you deciding as we speak, or is something else going on in your brain or elsewhere in your body that is determining your actions? Stopping to think this way can freeze us in our tracks. A lot in the world feels far beyond our control--the last thing we need is to question whether we make our own choices in the way we usually assume we do. Questions about free will are so major and consequential that we may prefer not to thin…Read more
-
28Revisiting Neuroscientific Skepticism about Free WillThe Harvard Review of Philosophy. forthcoming.Benefiting from recent work in neuroscience, this paper rebuts a pair of neuroscience-based arguments for the non-existence of free will. Well-known neuroscientific experiments that have often been cited in support of skepticism about free will are critically examined. Various problems are identified with attempts to use their findings to support the claim that free will is an illusion. It is argued on scientific grounds that certain assumptions made in these skeptical arguments are unjustified—…Read more
-
28The Single Phenomenon View and Experimental PhilosophyIn M. Vargas & G. Yaffe (eds.), Rational and Social Agency: Essays on the Philosophy of Michael Bratman, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.This chapter explores the merits of two different versions of what Michael Bratman has dubbed “The Single Phenomenon View” of intentional action – Bratman’s version and Alfred Mele’s version. The primary focus is on what is done intentionally in cases featuring side effects. Some studies in experimental philosophy that seem to count in favor of Bratman’s view and against Mele’s are discussed with a view to uncovering their bearing on the disagreement between Bratman and Mele.
-
27Self-Control, Action, and BeliefAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 22 (2). 1985.This paper is an attempt to characterize self-control and to make evident the bearing of this trait of character on our actions, evaluative thinking, and non-evaluative beliefs. In Section I, I focus on action and practical reasoning and advance an account of self-control which applies to both. In Section II, I turn to the bearing of self-control upon our beliefs. I argue there that "doxastic" self-control is properly conceived in accordance with the account developed in Section I.
-
27Conscious IntentionsIn J. Campbell, M. O'Rourke & H. Silverstein (eds.), Action, Ethics, and Responsibility, Mit Press. 2010.This chapter discusses the nature of intentions and how it is discussed in a variety of fields, including neuroscience, philosophy, law, and several branches of psychology. It should be noted that the term is not understood in the same way in all fields; the chapter will focus on an account of intentions similar to that held by neuroscience, specifically the concept of occurrent intentions as commanding attitudes toward plans. A number of psychologists assume that intentions are conscious in nat…Read more
-
27Free Will and Luck: Reply to CriticsPhilosophical Explorations 10 (2): 195-210. 2007.I am grateful to my critics—E. J. Coffman and Ted Warfield, Dana Nelkin, Timothy O’Connor, and Derk Pereboom—for their good work on Free Will and Luck (2006). Philoso- phers traditionally focus on their disagreements with one another. My reply is squarely within that tradition, as are the articles to which I am replying.
-
26Aristotle on the Justification of EndsProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 56 79-86. 1982.I believe Aristotle's position on practical ends is both illuminating and consistent with the idea that practical archai, and even conceptions of the ultimate end, are subject to justificatory reasoning. The purpose of this paper is substantiate these beliefs.
-
26Intentions and InterpretationsMLN 107 (5): 931-949. 1992.Even if everything is up for grabs in philosophy, some things are very difficult to doubt. It is hard to believe, for example, that no one ever acts intentionally. Even the most powerful arguments for the unreality of intentional action could do no more, we believe, than place one in roughly the position in which pre-Aristotelian Greeks found themselves when presented with one of Zeno's arguments that nothing can move from any given point A to any other point B. One argument has it, for example,…Read more
-
26Soft Libertarianism and Flickers of FreedomIn David Widerker & Michael McKenna (eds.), Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities, Ashgate. pp. 251--264. 2003.In this chapter, drawing partly on some attractions to soft libertarianism and on a libertarian approach articulated in Mele (1996) to accommodating successful Frankfurt-style cases, I motivate the thesis that at least some human beings sometimes act freely than that no human being ever acts freely.
-
26Agency and Mental ActionNoûs 31 (s11): 231-249. 1997.My question here is whether there are intentional mental actions that generate special, significant threats to causalism (i.e., threats of a kind not generated by intentional overt actions), or that generate, more poignantly, problems for causalism that some intentional overt actions allegedly generate, as well.
-
26Akratic Action and the Practical Role of Better JudgmentPacific Philosophical Quarterly 72 (1): 33-47. 1991.
-
25Aristotle on the Proximate Efficient Cause of ActionCanadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (sup1): 133-155. 1984.In this paper I shall attempt to locate and articulate Aristotle's answer to a foundational question in the theory of action - viz., 'what is the proximate (efficient) cause of action?' This task is certainly of historical importance, since one cannot hope to understand Aristotle's interesting and influential theory of action without understanding his views on the proximate efficient cause of action. But the present project is not, I should think, of historical interest alone; for it has recentl…Read more
-
25Can Libertarians Make Promises?In John Hyman & Helen Steward (eds.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 217-241. 2004.Libertarians hold that free action and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism and that some human beings occasionally act freely and are morally responsible for some of what they do. Can libertarians who know both that they are right and that they are free make sincere promises? Peter van Inwagen, a libertarian, contends that they cannot—at least when they assume that should they do what they promise to do, they would do it freely. Probably, this strikes many readers as a surpris…Read more
-
25Mental CausationRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 185 (1): 105-106. 1995.Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explanations of behavior have only a pragmatic standing or we abandon our conception of the physical domain as causally autonomous. Although each option has…Read more
-
24Soft Libertarianism and Frankfurt-Style ScenariosPhilosophical Topics 24 (2): 123-141. 1996.Traditional libertarians about freedom of choice and action and about moral responsibility are hard-line incompatibilists. They claim that these freedoms (which they believe to be possessed by at least some human beings) are incompatible with determinism, and they take the same view of moral responsibility. I call them hard libertarians. A softer line is available to theorists who have libertarian sympathies. A theorist may leave it open that freedom of choice and action and moral responsibil…Read more
-
24Autonomy and NeuroscienceIn L. Radoilska (ed.), Autonomy and Mental Disorder, Oxford University Press. 2012.I opened this chapter with the question whether neuroscientific experiments have shown that there are no autonomous human beings. In my opinion, the answer is no. I have not argued for that answer here, of course. Doing so is much too grand a project for a single chapter. Instead, I attacked one line of argument for the claim that neuroscientific experiments have shown that human autonomy is an illusion and I discussed an important difficulty in moving from an alleged finding about proximal deci…Read more
-
24Causation, Action, and Free WillIn H. Beebee, C. Hitchcock & P. Menzies (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Causation, Oxford University Press. 2009.Many issues at the heart of the philosophy of action and of philosophical work on free will are framed partly in terms of causation. The leading approach to understanding both the nature of action and the explanation or production of actions emphasizes causation. What may be termed standardcausalism is the conjunction of the following two theses: firstly, an event's being an action depends on how it was caused; and secondly, proper explanations of actions are causal explanations. Important quest…Read more
-
24Aristotle on the Proximate Efficient Cause of ActionCanadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Vol. X (n/a): 133-155. 1984.In this paper I shall attempt to locate and articulate Aristotle's answer to a foundational question in the theory of action - viz., 'what is the proximate (efficient) cause of action?' This task is certainly of historical importance, since one cannot hope to understand Aristotle's interesting and influential theory of action without understanding his views on the proximate efficient cause of action. But the present project is not, I should think, of historical interest alone; for it has recentl…Read more
-
23Responsibility and freedom: The challenge of Frankfurt-style-casesIn Monika Betzler & Barbara Guckes (eds.), Autonomes Handeln: Beitrage Zur Philosophie von Harry G. Frankfurt, Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 2000.
-
23Free Will and Consciousness: An Introduction and Overview of PerspectivesIn A. Mele, R. Baumeister & K. Vohs (eds.), Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work?, Oxford University Press. 2010.This volume is aimed at readers who wish to move beyond debates about the existence of free will and the efficacy of consciousness and closer to appreciating how free will and consciousness might operate. It draws from philosophy and psychology, the two fields that have grappled most fundamentally with these issues. In this wide-ranging volume, the contributors explore such issues as how free will is connected to rational choice, planning, and self-control; roles for consciousness in decision ma…Read more
-
23Emotion and Desire in Self-DeceptionRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 52 163-179. 2003.According to a traditional view of self-deception, the phenomenon is an intrapersonal analogue of stereotypical interpersonal deception. In the latter case, deceiversintentionallydeceive others into believing something,p, and there is a time at which the deceivers believe thatpis false while their victims falsely believe thatpis true. If self-deception is properly understood on this model, self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves into believing something,p, and there is a time at which th…Read more
Tallahassee, Florida, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |