Process, Action, and Experience

Edited by Rowland Stout

Presents a compelling case for a philosophical re-evaluation of our thinking about action and experience
Contributions from the leading philosophers in the world in this area
Opens up a new area of philosophical inquiry

Process, Action, and Experience

Edited by Rowland Stout

Description

There has been a philosophical upheaval recently in our understanding of the metaphysics of the mind. The philosophy of mind and action has traditionally treated its subject matter as consisting of states and events, and completely ignored the category of ongoing process. So the mental things that happen - experiences and actions - have been taken to be completed events and not ongoing processes. But events by their very nature as completed wholes are never present to the agent or subject; only ongoing processes can be present to a subject in the way required for conscious experience and practical self-knowledge. This suggests that a proper understanding of processes is required to understand subjective experience and agency.

This volume explores the possibility and advantages of taking processes to be the subject matter of the philosophy of mind and action. The central defining feature of the process argument is its use of the progressive (as opposed to perfective) aspect. But beyond this, philosophers working on the metaphysics of processes do not agree. The contributors to this volume take up this argument in the metaphysics of processes. Are processes continuants? Are they particulars at all, or should we rather be thinking of process activity as a kind of stuff? Process, Action, and Experience considers whether practical reasoning and practical self-knowledge require thinking of action in process terms, and it considers arguments for the processive nature of conscious experience.

Process, Action, and Experience

Edited by Rowland Stout

1. Introduction: Process, Action and Experience, Rowland Stout
2. Processes, Activities and Actions, David Charles
3. Processes as Patterns of Occurrence, Antony Galton
4. Processes as Continuants and Process as Stuff, Thomas Crowther
5. Experience, Process, Continuity and Boundary, Matthew Soteriou
6. Occurrent States, Helen Steward
7. What is a Process? - Modes of Occurrence and Forms of Dynamicity in General Process Theory, Johanna Seibt
8. The Process of Inference, Christopher Mole
9. The Progress of the Deed, Anton Ford
10. Praxeology, Imperatives, and Shifts of View, Benj Hellie
11. Ballistic Action, Rowland Stout

Process, Action, and Experience

Edited by Rowland Stout

Author Information

Rowland Stout is Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin and is the author of Things that happen because they should (OUP 1996), Action (Acumen 2005), and The Inner Life of a Rational Agent (Edinburgh University Press 2006)

Contributors:

David Charles, Yale University
Thomas Crowther, University of Warwick
Anton Ford, University of Chicago
Antony Galton, University of Exeter
Benj Hellie, University of Toronto
Christopher Mole, University of British Columbia
Johanna Seibt, Aarhus University
Matthew Soteriou, King's College London
Helen Steward, University of Leeds
Rowland Stout, University College Dublin