Mind Out of Action

Mind Out of Action challenges a central dogma ofcontemporary philosophy of action, causalism: theidea that some movement is an action in virtue of thekind of causes it has; namely, psychological statesthat rationalize it. By looking at automatic actions,Di Nucci argues against both reductive (Davidson) andnon-reductive (the Simple View and Bratman) causalaccounts of intentional action. Automatic actions areroutine performances the agent carries out withouthaving to attend to them, like changing gear orpulling a trigger. The author argues that automaticactions do not fit the causalist bill because thereis not always evidence for the attribution of therequired content-specific psychological states. After having presented and defined the concept ofAutomatic Action, and having shown how common suchconcept is in empirical psychology, Di Nucci goes onto argue against reductive and non-reductivecausalism. In the last chapter an alternative tocausalism is presented and defended, the GuidanceView, inspired by Frankfurt. Mind Out of Action will be of interest to studentsand scholars of the philosophy of mind and action, aswell as to psychologists.