Jessica Wahman

An important aspect of human flourishing is the sense of empowerment—the human ability to direct one’s own paths and to make some positive difference in the world. Narratives about individual trajectories and the general stories told about human nature can shape this sense of agency. Specifically, mechanistic models of human behavior can promote a narrative that alienates conscious subjects from their own material organism, making them passive observers in their own life story. As a means of reconstructing the narrative, this chapter turns to pragmatic psychology, where the self is conceived as a system of habits. The chapter shows that identifying the self with the entire organism—one which is not merely a mechanism and of which consciousness is an integral part—allows for a different kind of agency, one that better recognizes both human choices and limitations and that identifies concrete possibilities for increasing freedom and happiness.

It has been said that pragmatism’s “merely instrumental” truths fail to motivate radical change whereas absolute ideals make excellent guiding and driving forces for justice. However, in Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights, Robert Moses speaks of the radical success of pragmatic principles, used in the Civil Rights Movement, that are continued today in the Algebra Project. This paper applies Dewey’s claims about education and community to Moses’s own arguments as a means of depicting the role that pragmatic ideals play in achieving radical social change.

The article analyzes recent Western interpretations of the Theravāda Buddhist position on free will in order to reveal how differences in worldview and methodology impact claims about agency—exposing assumptions about the meaning of will, cause, and self—and how commonalities across traditions enable us to discover what may be at stake, more generally, in the philosophical problem of free will. Embedded in different ontologies and expressed by disparate means are similar intuitions about consciousness, coercion, and the transformative power of wisdom as well as deeply human concerns about what we can and cannot change and with whom we should or should not find fault. Ultimately, this study of cross-cultural conversations aims to demonstrate how careful attention to assumptions underlying the concepts of will, causation, selfhood, and desert can prove both edifying and liberating.

I argue that the dichotomous treatment of agency and free will is problematic because it rests on a Cartesian interpretation of self and world that many present-day thinkers take themselves to be denying. I do so in order to reconstruct the concept of human agency using the psychologies of American philosophers John Dewey and George Santayana. Identifying the self with the entire organism, as these thinkers do, allows for an importantly different sense of agency. In embracing an organismic interpretation of the self, we achieve a more realistic yet mitigated sense of agency, where real responsibility for action is placed in a context of biological and environmental (including social, cultural, and historical) influences.

The title of this book invites the question "what makes a metaphysical club real?" Overthinkers like myself may wonder whether metaphysical clubs can partake of varying degrees of reality or whether the distinction is, more likely, one between imposters and the genuine article. It only heightens the curiosity to read, in the general introduction to the book, that metaphysical clubs both preceded and followed the so-called "real" one and that the real one was itself divided into two phases. Given, then, that there appear to have been more than one actual metaphysical club, what is the point of characterizing the subject of this anthology as real?The Real Metaphysical Club focuses entirely and thoroughly on the club...

Neste artigo, argumento que a marca de uma metafísica viável é tanto prática e ética quanto é lógica e sistemática. Para tal, analiso os Diálogos no Limbo de George Santayana, no qual ele afirma seu apoio ao materialismo atomístico de Demócrito em bases pragmáticas. Uma metafísica, ele sugere, é uma visão de mundo que acomoda uma pessoa – vista como um determinado tipo de organismo psicológico – sabiamente às forças da natureza e da melhor forma possibilita essa pessoa a levar uma vida próspera. Ao mesmo tempo, Santayana coloca sua marca no materialismo ao questionar a possibilidade da caracterização geométrica dos átomos de Demócrito ser uma explicação literal da substância material. Ele interpreta a metafísica Democritiana como uma posição poética e mitológica que desconsidera a experiência subjetiva e, em vez de, volta nossa atenção para as origens substrativas do nosso ser.