ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the paradigm for conceptualizing human action should essentially refer to animal powers. It develops an animalist account of agency in the Aristotelian tradition, on which animal corporeality fundamentally informs the paradigm concept of action. For Aristotle, powers of agency are defined in an incontrovertibly animal way: locomotion is linked to sense perception, and both are related to animal desire, which moves the animal in a specifically agential way. The chapter discusses two major implications of Aristotle’s thesis.
First, the chapter provides an Aristotelian critique of the concept of action according to the standard Cartesian account, on which action is, paradigmatically, human action. The standard account assumes an overly intellectualist explanation on which certain mental antecedents, such as beliefs and desires, are necessarily invoked within one’s causal explanation of agency. By requiring conditions of rational mind, the standard account excludes non-rational animals from the paradigm concept of action. The chapter argues that we should defend an animalist account of agency against this anti-naturalistic narrative, in order to secure a metaphysically coherent picture of agency as causally distinctive but ultimately unexceptional in the natural world.
Second, the chapter develops an interpretation of Aristotle as promoting a concept of action as a unified psychophysical process. The chapter argues that this concept provides a plausible basis for developing an Aristotelian variety of action disjunctivism, which claims that action and mere movement are fundamentally different kinds of phenomena. Unlike contemporary disjunctivist theories of action, the Aristotelian variant defended insists on the significance of animality for the justification of its account. Aristotelian psychophysical processes can be broadly interpreted as occurring in natural contexts outside of human agency, for many non-human animals likewise are agents, capable of exercising a form of activity that should be recognized as psychophysical in its primary characteristic. Thus, Aristotelian disjunctivism about action holds an additional advantage of appealing to a naturalistic account of agency and agents.
