ABSTRACT
This chapter examines walking together as a paradigm example in the philosophy of action. It begins with an overview of shared action as a philosophical topic of inquiry, and then turns to three major theories that employ the example of walking together to illustrate their explanatory frameworks: Michael Bratman’s planning theory of acting together, Margaret Gilbert’s plural subject theory, and Hans Bernhard Schmid’s account of relational collective agency. Building on these differing portrayals of both togetherness and walking together, the chapter draws two key insights. First, the way shared action is conceptualized shapes what we imagine can be learned from participating in it – an important consideration for researchers employing walking together as a method. Second, examining accounts that abstract from context – such as cultural background or structural inequality – can help reveal the limits of such abstraction and clarify what remains unarticulated in classical models of shared agency. The chapter concludes by turning to Åsa Burman’s proposal of a nonideal social ontology to illuminate the limitations of ideal theory in capturing the dynamics of walking together under conditions of structural asymmetry. Taken together, these insights challenge canonical methodological commitments in philosophy of action and suggest new avenues for reflecting on walking together as a research method.
