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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2010
The philosophy of action is principally concerned with human action. Its main aims are to explain the distinction between activity and passivity in human life and to describe the circumstances in which an action by a human being is correctly described as voluntary, intentional, or culpable. These are obviously fundamental problems in ethics and jurisprudence. But a satisfactory philosophy of action will depend on a theory of belief and desire, of practical reasoning, and of causation. So the philosophy of action is also closely connected with the philosophy of mind, with logic and with metaphysics.
Although Aristotle, Aquinas and Bentham made permanent contributions to the philosophy of action, recent interest in the subject stems from work published between six and three decades ago. This work was initially focused on the definition of voluntary action, but it rapidly came to embrace the other topics mentioned. At stake was the classical positivist view, expounded with particular clarity by Mill, that the human sciences are comparable to the exact natural sciences in their infancy:
The Science of Human Nature [Mill wrote] may be said to exist, in proportion as the approximate truths, which compose a practical knowledge of mankind, can be exhibited as corollaries from the universal laws of human nature on which they rest.
(A System of Logic, Bk. 6, Ch. 3.)The principal writers in the 1940s and 1950s opposed this positivist idea.
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