On Friday, 14 May 2010, Dr Giuseppina (Josie) D’Oro presented the first seminar of the Keele Philosophy Forum’s 2010 Summer Series. The topic was “The Concept of Action” and Josie spoke for about one hour followed by two hours of questions and discussion, one in the seminar room, the second one in Keele’s award-winning coffee bar, Le Cafe.
The starting point of the paper was the claim that debates in philosophy of action, in particular with regard to the concept of action, were not so much generated by new discoveries concerning our actions, but by shifts in the metaphysical commitments of the participants. One such recent shift, she noted, was a renewed interest in revisionary metaphysics (understood along the lines of Strawson’s destinction between revisionary and descriptive metaphysics).
Against the background of a revisionary metaphysics, an action is a particular type of event in the same way in which a Siamese cat is a type of cat. By contrast, Josie attempted to offer a view of the Read more
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