ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors agree that human action is suffused with rich phenomenal character of a specifically agentive kind, and their largely agree about the introspectable features of this phenomenology. Agentive-instigation experience is itself phenomenomenally manifest, after all. So is the experiential aspect of one’s body’s moving the way it does because of one’s having instigated that motion. The authors distinguish six phenomenally manifest aspects present in all or many cases of agentive experience: the aspect of self as source, of optionality, of purposiveness, of chromatic illumination, of apparently acting for certain practical reasons, of motivational pull, and finally the “rational-becausal” aspect of agentive experience. They has been seeking to articulate and defend a position that fully acknowledges the phenomenal character of agentive experience, treats such experience as veridical, and renders agentive phenomenology compatible with familiar, broadly “materialist,” tenets in metaphysics and philosophy of mind.
