Motivation and Agency

by Alfred R. Mele

Overview

What place does motivation have in the lives of intelligent agents? Mele's answer is sensitive to the concerns of philosophers of mind and moral philosophers and informed by empirical work. He offers a distinctive, comprehensive, attractive view of human agency. This book stands boldly at the intersection of philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and metaphysics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195156171
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/02/2003
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.10(d)
Lexile:	1490L (what's this?)

About the Author

Alfred R. Mele is the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University.

Editorial Reviews

"This is a thoughtful, detailed, empirically informed, and trenchant discussion of some main ideas and issues at the center of our understanding of the phenomenon of motivation —including especially motivation of intentional action and intention, but also including motivation of belief. Mele's book makes contributions to our understanding of intentional action, of the relation between motivation and normativity, of practical reasoning, of self control, of forms of agency sometimes seen as distinctively human, and of motivated belief...The book makes many detailed and significant contributions to various contemporary discussions and will be of significant interest to a wide range of scholars of human action."—Michael Bratman, Stanford University

"Why do we do what we do? Alfred Mele attempts to answer this question and related ones by drawing from the fields of action theory, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and even empirical psychology. The result is a book that is clearly written, shows a command of the contemporary literature in a number of fields, and attempts to offer rigorous solutions that nonetheless take into account commonsense opinions about the topics."—Review of Metaphysics

From the Publisher