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  1. Failure and Success in Agency.David Heering - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (2):590-613.
    Agency often consists in performing actions and engaging in activities that are successful. We pour glasses, catch objects, carry things, recite poems, and play instruments. It has therefore seemed tempting in recent philosophical thinking to conceptualise the relationship between our agentive abilities and our successes as follows: (Success) S is exercising their ability to ϕ only if S successfully ϕ-s. This paper argues that (Success) is false based on the observation that agency also often consists in making mistakes. We bungle (...)
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  • A Disjunctive Account of Desire.Kael McCormack - 2022 - Dissertation, University of New South Wales
    This thesis motivates a novel account of desire as the best explanation of an intuitive datum. The intuitive datum is that often when an agent desires P she will immediately, outright know that she has a reason to bring P about. Existing explanations of the intuitive datum cannot simultaneously satisfy two desiderata. We want to explain how desires enable outright knowledge of reasons and also explain the fallibility of desires. Existing views satisfy the first desideratum at the expense of the (...)
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  • Desire-Based Theories of Reasons and the Guise of the Good.Kael McCormack - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (47):1288-1321.
    I propose an account of desire that reconciles two apparently conflicting intuitions about practical agency. I do so by exploring a certain intuitive datum. The intuitive datum is that often when an agent desires P she will seem to immediately and conclusively know that there is a reason to bring P about. Desire-based theories of reasons seem uniquely placed to explain this intuitive datum. On this view, desires are the source of an agent’s practical reasons. A desire for P grounds (...)
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  • Actual Control - Demodalising Free Will.David Heering - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Leeds
    Plausibly, agents act freely iff their actions are responses to reasons. But what sort of relationship between reason and action is required for the action to count as a response? The overwhelmingly dominant answer to this question is modalist. It holds that responses are actions that share a modally robust or secure relationship with the relevant reasons. This thesis offers a new alternative answer. It argues that responses are actions that can be explained by reasons in the right way. This (...)
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  • From the agent’s point of view: the case against disjunctivism about rationalisation.Edgar Phillips - 2021 - Philosophical Explorations 24 (2):262-280.
    ABSTRACT A number of authors have recently advanced a ‘disjunctivist’ view of the rationalising explanation of action, on which rationalisations of the form ‘S A’d because p’ are explanations of a fundamentally different kind from rationalisations of the form ‘S A’d because she believed that p’. Less attempt has been made to explicitly articulate the case against this view. This paper seeks to remedy that situation. I develop a detailed version of what I take to be the basic argument against (...)
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  • The matter of motivating reasons.J. J. Cunningham - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (5):1563-1589.
    It is now standard in the literature on reasons and rationality to distinguish normative reasons from motivating reasons. Two issues have dominated philosophical theorising concerning the latter: (i) whether we should think of them as certain (non-factive) psychological states of the agent – the dispute over Psychologism; and (ii) whether we should say that the agent can Φ for the reason that p only if p – the dispute over Factivism. This paper first introduces a puzzle: these disputes look very (...)
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