ABSTRACT
It is the mark of our finitude that human action is extended in time and subject to the possibility of interruption. Understanding human agency thus requires an account of the relation between progression and completion. The paper discusses the contemporary views of the metaphysics of action in light of this requirement and finds them wanting. According to the standard view, actions are events. Recently it has been suggested that doing justice to the temporality of human agency requires the introduction of processes into ontology. The views of what processes are and how they are related to events are various. On closer inspection, however, the multiple proposals on offer come down to two main approaches. According to the one, the relation between progression and completion is to be conceived in terms of mutually exclusive properties of an underlying particular. According to the other, it is to be understood as the relation between two irreducible distinct kinds of temporal entities. I argue that both approaches ultimately run into paradox, and I suggest that the source of the difficulty is the attempt to capture the metaphysics of action in the conceptual framework of the binary distinction between act types and their tokens.
