ABSTRACT
Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers an account of agency that centres on habit. He intends his view to tread a middle path between attempts to explain action in purely causal, mechanical terms and those that understand action as brute bodily movement, controlled by thought. He also takes his view to illustrate how the conceptual framework that gives rise to these positions is mistaken. This chapter recasts the dialectic between empiricist and intellectualist accounts of action in contemporary terms and then presents Merleau-Ponty's view of agency, locating it within this dialectic. It considers the charge that Merleau-Ponty's account collapses into empiricism, and argues that this worry can be overcome by paying greater attention to a difference noted by Annas between habits and skills. The chapter also considers a second objection which claims that the revised Merleau-Pontyian account collapses into Intellectualism. It further develops a Merleau-Pontyian view of agency that is immune to this worry.
