ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Adolf Reinach’s account of agency and his phenomenological approach to agency. It shows that Reinach’s account of agency concerns intentional acts, rather than intentional bodily actions, and explains how it is grounded in a phenomenological account of intentional lived experiences that are characterized by different levels of positionality. The chapter argues that the sense of agency captured by Reinach’s account of spontaneous acts is a sense of “authorship” that ought to be sharply distinguished from a sense of ownership. It describes that the agency of social acts requires the involvement of at least two individuals and that they are position-takings of a second level, as spontaneous acts are, or even of a higher level. The specific contribution of Reinach’s work is the extension of that idea to social reality and the discovery of such material a priori in the social world.
