Chengying Guan

The thesis is a study in the philosophy of action. It opens by identifying the field’s two central issues: action metaphysics and action explanation. It then sets out to challenge the so-called ‘standard story of action’, as a theory that addresses both issues, and to explore an alternative, with emphasis on the metaphysical dimension. Part I examines the standard story, identified more specifically as ‘standard event causalism’. Chapter 1 provides historical context by discussing the rise and fall of old volitionism as its predecessor. Chapter 2 investigates its genesis and constitution, dissecting it into six core, mutually independent claims. Chapter 3 offers a systematic critique, arguing that standard event causalism fails to resolve the problems of deviant causation and the disappearing agent, and faces other challenges such as accounting for tool-using actions. Part II lays the ontological and methodological groundwork for an alternative. Chapter 4 critiques classical agent causalism, concerning both its intelligibility and the embrace of event ontology that it shares with standard event causalism. Chapter 5 presents a methodological, cross-linguistic challenge specifically to Davidson’s influential semantic argument that actions are events. Part III develops the preliminaries of a theory falling under the strand that I call ‘novel agent causalism’. Chapter 6 explores the ontological commitments of this theory, concentrating on the idea that actions conceptualised as agent-causings constitute a category sui generis; furthermore, it investigates the ontology of agent, arguing that agents are powerful substances. Chapter 7 discusses the classification and synthesis of agents and addresses the concern that novel agent causalism remains an incomplete theory of action because it says little about action explanation. Chapter 8 explores the phenomenon of tool use, arguing it is a crucial, yet overlooked, aspect of human agency; it proposes a new definition of tool use based on the notion of affordance and argues that novel agent causalism may have a distinctive potential of accommodating this phenomenon. The thesis concludes by suggesting that its methodological departure from linguistic parochialism and its portrayal of human agents as animals who systematically rely on tools to act together embody a ‘neo-cosmopolitan’ ideal in philosophy.

This paper concerns the Wishful Thinking Problem for non-cognitivism, which has recently been raised by Cian Dorr. Contrary to Dorr’s claim that the Wishful Thinking Problem is a new crucial objection to non-cognitivism in addition to the well-known Frege-Geach Problem, I argue that recent research has shown that the Wishful Thinking Problem is not independent of the Frege-Geach Problem and therefore it is not lethal to non-cognitivism. However, the Wishful Thinking Problem is still a problem for non-cognitivism, for it reveals that the Frege-Geach Problem may be even more troublesome than non-cognitivists originally thought.