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Against the Possibility of a Merely Instrumentally Rational AgentIn James Conant & Dawa Ometto (eds.), Practical Reason in Historical and Systematic Perspective, De Gruyter. pp. 135-169. 2023.Can we coherently conceive of an agent whose practical rationality is limited to merely instrumental reasoning? I argue that we cannot. Existing arguments to this effect have focused on what is required in order to have reasons to take means to our ends-or on what is required in order to be bound by the so-called ‘instrumental principle’. By contrast, I argue that consideration of the special kind of concept-use characteristic of instrumental reasoning reveals that a merely instrumentally ration…Read more
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47Two Conceptions of Instrumental ThoughtPhilosophical Quarterly 74 (2): 637-657. 2024.According to a dominant assumption the truth of instrumental thoughts—thoughts in which one action is identified as a means to another—are not affected by agents’ normative conceptions of their ends. Agents could in principle grasp these thoughts, and thereby the correct means to their ends, without consulting any conception they may have as to the pursuit-worthiness of those ends. I argue this assumption (the ‘Theoretical Conception’) prevents us from explaining how agents can identify means to…Read more
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21The Value of Humanity by Nandi Theunissen (Oxford University Press, 2020) (review)Philosophy 96 (3): 486-490. 2021.
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116“I Do What Happens”: The Productive Character of Practical KnowledgeCanadian Journal of Philosophy 50 (5): 670-686. 2020.Elizabeth Anscombe introduced the notion of “practical knowledge” into contemporary philosophy. Philosophers of action have criticized Anscombe’s negative characterization of such knowledge as “non-observational,” but have recently come to pay more attention to her positive characterization of practical knowledge as “the cause of what it understands.” I argue that two recent Anscombean accounts of practical knowledge, “Formalism” and “Normativism,” each fail to explain the productive character o…Read more
Rory O'Connell
Polonsky Academy, The Van Leer Institute
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Polonsky Academy, The Van Leer InstitutePolonsky Fellow
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Value Theory |