Davidson's 1963 essay "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" convinced most philosophers that reason explanations are a species of causal explanation. By way of argument, Davidson challenged the non-causalist to make sense of cases where the agent has more than one reason that would justify her behavior but only acts on one of these reasons. We claim that a teleological account of action explanation can answer Davidson's challenge, but we argue further that if the Davidsonian challenge is a problem for the teleologist, (...) then it is equally a problem for the causalist, and thus cannot serve as an argument for causalism. (shrink)

R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) was an English philosopher, historian and practicing archaeologist. His work, particularly in the philosophy of action and history, has been profoundly influential in the 20th and 21st century. Although the importance of his work is indisputable, this is the first book to consider how and why it actually matters. Giussepina D'oro considers the importance of Collingwood as a thinker who thinks kaleidoscopically and, unlike lots of contemporary philosophers, refuses to focus on narrow, technical interests but instead, observes (...) the whole world of thought. Why Collingwood Matters revives Collingwood's conception of the role and character of philosophical analysis and shows how it informs his understanding of the mind, what it means to act, and what it means to understand the past historically. It also argues for the relevance of his metaphilosophical approach to the challenge posed by the Anthropocene and the global environmental crisis. Both an elucidation of Collingwood's thought and a lively exploration of it's contemporary relevance, Why Collingwood Matters provides a much-needed examination of a 20th-century polymath. (shrink)

This paper takes a critical stance on Tallis’s separation of causation and agency. While his critique of the causal theory of action and the assumptions about causation underlying different versions of determinism, including the one based on neuroscience is right, his rejection of causation (of all sorts) has implausible consequences. Denying the link between action and causation amounts to overlooking the role action plays in causal inference and in the origin of causal concepts. I suggest that a weaker version of (...) Tallis’ claim, compatible with causation understood as agency, would work better. (shrink)

Though the divide between reason-based and causal-explanatory approaches in psychiatry and psychopathology is old and deeply rooted, current trends involving multi-factorial explanatory models and evidence-based approaches to interpersonal psychotherapy, show that it has already been implicitly bridged. These trends require a philosophical reconsideration of how reasons can be causes. This paper contributes to that trajectory by arguing that Donald Davidson’s classic paradigm of 1963 is still a valid option.

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 372 - 392 In this essay I revisit some anti-causalist arguments relating to reason-giving explanations of action put forth by numerous philosophers writing in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s in what Donald Davidson dismissively described as a ‘neo-Wittgensteinian current of small red books’. While chiefly remembered for subscribing to what has come to be called the ‘logical connection’ argument, the positions defended across these volumes are in fact as diverse as they are (...) subtle, united largely by a an anti-scientistic spirit which may reasonably be described as historicist. I argue that while Davidson’s causalist attack was motivated by an important explanatory insight borrowed from Hempel, it caused serious damage to the philosophy of action by effectively brushing over a number of vital distinctions made in the aforementioned works. In seeking to revive these I propose an approach to the theory of action explanation that rescues the anti-causalist baby from the historicist bathwater. (shrink)