Philosophy of Action E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1482

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The Philosophy of Action: An Anthology is an authoritative collection of key work by top scholars, arranged thematically and accompanied by expert introductions written by the editors. This unique collection brings together a selection of the most influential essays from the 1960s to the present day.

• An invaluable collection that brings together a selection of the most important classic and contemporary articles in philosophy of action, from the 1960’s to the present day
• No other broad-ranging and detailed coverage of this kind currently exists in the field
• Each themed section opens with a synoptic introduction and includes a comprehensive further reading list to guide students
• Includes sections on action and agency, willing and trying, intention and intentional action, acting for a reason, the explanation of action, and free agency and responsibility
• Written and organised in a style that allows it to be used as a primary teaching resource in its own right

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Preface

Source Acknowledgments

1

Philosophical Investigations

§§611–628

Part I: Action and Agency

Introduction to Part I

1.

2.

3.

References

Further Reading

2 Agency

3 Shooting, Killing and Dying

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

4 The Problem of Action

I

II

III

IV

V

5 Agents and their Actions

1. Agent Causation

2. Actions and Events

3. Bodily Movements

4. What Actions Are

5. Basic Actions

6. Actions and Locations

6 Agency and Actions

1

2

3

4

5

Part II: Willing and Trying

Introduction to Part II

1.

2.

References

Further Reading

7 Acting, Willing, Desiring

8 The Will

1. Foreword

2. The Myth of Volitions

3. The Distinction between Voluntary and Involuntary

9 Acting and Trying to Act

1

2

3

4

References

10 Action and Volition

1. Agents and Actions

2. Bodily Movements and Bodily Motions

3. Voluntary Actions and Volitions

4. Basic and Non-basic Voluntary Actions

5. In Defence of Volitions

Part III: Intention and Intentional Action

Introduction to Part III

1.

2.

3.

4.

References

Further Reading

11

Intention

§§1–9

12 Knowing What I Am Doing

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

13 Intending

14 Two Faces of Intention

1. Consistency of Intention and the Simple View

2. Objections and Replies

3. Intention and Volition

4. Intention and Motivational Potential

5. Motivational Potential Extended

6. Motivational Potential and the Distinctiveness of Intention

7. Two Faces of Intention

15 Acting As One Intends

16 Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language

1. First Experiment

2. Second Experiment

3. Explaining the Results

References

17 The Toxin Puzzle

18 The Ontology of Social Agency

0. Introduction

1. Social Agents

2. Social Actions

3. Social Attitudes

4. Ascribing Attitudes to Social Agents

5. Social Agents’ Knowledge of What They are Doing

6. Bodily Movements and Action

7. Individuating Agents

References

Part IV: Acting for a Reason

Introduction to Part IV

1.

2.

Reference

Further Reading

19 Actions, Reasons, and Causes

I

II

III

IV

20 How to Act for a Good Reason

1. Psychologism: The Three-Part Story and the Normative Story

2. Against the Three-Part Story

3. Because He Believes That

p

4. The Role of Belief in the Psychologising Restatement of a Reason

5. Factive and Non-Factive Explanations

References

21 Acting for a Reason

1. Introduction: Reason and Reasons

2. Three Questions about Reasons

3. Mental States and Good-making Properties

4. The Goodness of Action

5. Motivation: The Relation between Reasons and Actions

References

22 Arational Actions

23 Agency, Reason, and the Good

1. Reason and the Good

2. Expressive Action

3. How Strong are These Arguments?

24 Skepticism About Weakness of Will

Two Kinds of Skepticism

Socrates and Davidson

Self-Control and the Socratic Theory of Virtue

Weakness and Compulsion

Preliminary Difficulties

Strength and Resistibility

The Proposed Account versus the Common Account

Conclusion

Part V: The Explanation of Action

Introduction to Part V

1.

2.

Reference

Further Reading

25 Explanation in Science and in History §§1–3

1. Introduction

2. Two Basic Types of Scientific Explanation

3. Elliptic and Partial Explanations: Explanation Sketches

26 The Rationale of Actions

1. Historical Understanding as ‘Empathetic’

2. Explaining and Justifying Actions

3. The Point of the ‘Identification’ Metaphor

4. Generalizations and Principles of Action

27 Explanation in Science and in History §§4–7

1. Genetic Explanation in History

2. Explanation by Motivating Reasons

3. Concluding Remarks

28 The Explanatory Role of Being Rational

1. Hempel vs Davidson on the Explanation of Action

2. Are There Any Distinctive Non-constitutive Explanations of Action?

References

29 The Conceivability of Mechanism

30 Action, Causality, and Teleological Explanation

Introduction

1. The Standard View of Ends, Ends-in-View, and Causality

2. Teleology and Compensation

3. Compensation and Causality

4. Teleology and Behaviorism

5. Theology and Evolution

6. Teleology and Action

7. Action as Compensation

8. Pro Attitudes and Causality

31 Psychological vs. Biological Explanations of Behavior

Triggering and Structuring Causes

External Structuring Causes

Internal Structuring Causes

References

Part VI: Free Agency and Responsibility

Introduction to Part VI

1.

2.

3.

References

Further Reading

32 Human Freedom and the Self

33 Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility

I

II

III

IV

v

34 Responsibility, Control, and Omissions

I.  Omissions and Alternative Possibilities

II.  Omissions and Frankfurt-type Cases

III.  Some Tools to Solve the Puzzle

IV.  The Symmetric Principle of Moral Responsibility

V. An Objection

VI.  Conclusion

35 The Impossibility of Ultimate Responsibility?

1. The Basic Argument

2. Ultimate Moral Responsibility

3. Restatement of the Basic Argument

4. Response to the Basic Argument

References

36 Moral Responsibility and the Concept of Agency

1. Frankfurt and the Principle of Alternate Possibilities

2. Agency and Determinism

3. Causality, Determinism and the ‘Beginnings’ of Chains

4. The Relevant Power of Refrainment

5. The Objection from Ignorance

References

37 Free Will and Science

Libet’s Work: Introduction

Some Conceptual Background

Type II RPs, Conscious Decisions, and Actions

Vetoing and Free Will

Wegner’s Work: Introduction

Conscious Will and Scientific Epiphenomenalism

Wegner on Free Will

References

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 28

Figure 28.1 Humean account of the constitutive explanation of an action

Figure 28.2 A Humean account of a distinctive non-constitutive explanation of action

Figure 28.3 An anti-Humean account of a distinctive non-constitutive explanation of action

Chapter 31

Figure 31.1 Change brought about by learning.

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Pages

ii

iii

iv

v

x

xi

xii

1

2

3

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

63

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

135

136

137

138

139

140

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148

149

150

151

152

153

154

155

156

157

158

159

160

161

162

163

164

165

166

167

168

169

170

171

172

173

174

175

176

177

179

180

181

182

183

184

185

186

187

188

189

190

191

192

193

194

195

196

197

198

199

200

201

202

203

204

205

206

207

208

209

210

211

212

213

214

215

216

217

218

219

220

221

222

223

224

225

226

227

228

229

230

231

232

233

234

235

236

237

238

239

240

241

242

243

244

245

246

247

248

249

250

251

252

253

254

255

256

257

259

260

261

262

263

264

265

266

267

268

269

270

271

272

273

274

275

276

277

278

279

280

281

282

283

284

285

286

287

288

289

290

291

292

293

294

295

296

297

298

299

300

301

302

303

304

305

306

307

308

309

310

311

312

313

314

315

316

317

318

319

320

321

322

323

324

325

326

327

328

329

330

331

332

333

334

335

336

337

338

339

340

341

343

344

345

346

347

348

349

350

351

352

353

354

355

356

357

358

359

360

361

362

363

364

365

366

367

368

369

370

371

372

373

374

375

376

377

378

379

380

381

382

383

384

385

386

387

388

389

390

391

392

393

394

395

396

397

398

399

400

401

402

403

404

405

Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies

Each volume in this outstanding series provides an authoritative and comprehensive collection of the essential primary readings from philosophy’s main fields of study. Designed to complement the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, each volume represents an unparalleled resource in its own right, and will provide the ideal platform for course use.

Cottingham:

Western Philosophy: An Anthology

(second edition)

Cahoone:

From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology

(expanded second edition)

LaFollette:

Ethics in Practice: An Anthology

(third edition)

Goodin and Pettit:

Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology

(second edition)

Eze:

African Philosophy: An Anthology

McNeill and Feldman:

Continental Philosophy: An Anthology

Kim and Sosa:

Metaphysics: An Anthology

Lycan and Prinz:

Mind and Cognition: An Anthology

(third edition)

Kuhse and Singer:

Bioethics: An Anthology

(second edition)

Cummins and Cummins:

Minds, Brains, and Computers – The Foundations of Cognitive Science: An Anthology

Sosa, Kim, Fantl, and McGrath:

Epistemology: An Anthology

(second edition)

Kearney and Rasmussen:

Continental Aesthetics – Romanticism to Postmodernism: An Anthology

Martinich and Sosa:

Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology

Jacquette:

Philosophy of Logic: An Anthology

Jacquette:

Philosophy of Mathematics: An Anthology

Harris, Pratt, and Waters:

American Philosophies: An Anthology

Emmanuel and Goold:

Modern Philosophy – From Descartes to Nietzsche: An Anthology

Scharff and Dusek:

Philosophy of Technology – The Technological Condition: An Anthology

Light and Rolston:

Environmental Ethics: An Anthology

Taliaferro and Griffiths:

Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology

Lamarque and Olsen:

Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art – The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology

John and Lopes:

Philosophy of Literature – Contemporary and Classic Readings: An Anthology

Cudd and Andreasen:

Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology

Carroll and Choi:

Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology

Lange:

Philosophy of Science: An Anthology

Shafer-Landau and Cuneo:

Foundations of Ethics: An Anthology

Curren:

Philosophy of Education: An Anthology

Shafer-Landau:

Ethical Theory: An Anthology

Cahn and Meskin:

Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology

McGrew, Alspector-Kelly, and Allhoff:

The Philosophy of Science: An Historical Anthology

May:

Philosophy of Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings

Rosenberg and Arp:

Philosophy of Biology: An Anthology

Kim, Korman, and Sosa:

Metaphysics: An Anthology

(second edition)

Martinich and Sosa:

Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology

(second edition)

Shafer-Landau:

Ethical Theory: An Anthology

(second edition)

Hetherington:

Metaphysics and Epistemology: A Guided Anthology

Scharff and Dusek:

Philosophy of Technology – The Technological Condition: An Anthology

(second edition)

LaFollette:

Ethics in Practice: An Anthology

(fourth edition)

Davis:

Contemporary Moral and Social Issues: An Introduction through Original Fiction, Discussion, and Readings

Dancy and Sandis:

Philosophy of Action: An Anthology

Philosophy of Action

An Anthology

Edited by

Jonathan Dancy and Constantine Sandis

This edition first published 2015Editorial material and organization © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd., The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Jonathan Dancy and Constantine Sandis to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this book.

ISBN 9781118604533 (hardback); ISBN 9781118604519 (paperback)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Man Running Over Light Bulbs © Images.com / Corbis

Fred Dretske and Jonathan Lowe died while this volume was in preparation.It is dedicated to them.

Preface

Though all the great philosophers since Plato have included accounts of action in their philosophical systems, the philosophy of action only began to be conceived of as a discrete topic in philosophy towards the end of the last century. It is only recently that we have begun to find graduate classes devoted entirely to philosophy of action. The work of   Wittgenstein has been seminal in this change, and with that in mind we have placed some especially influential passages from this work in Chapter 1, outside the six parts that follow. With this exception, the material in the volume is divided thematically rather than chronologically (though the various parts have been ordered chronologically where doing so makes sense).

While appreciating that readers often dip into anthologies with very specific purposes, we have grouped the papers we reprint here (all except John McDowell’s chapter are already in print) into six parts. These are to some extent artificial, and certainly could have been done differently, but our aim was to offer a structure that might help in the design and development of a course on recent philosophy of action. That structure itself has led to some classic papers failing to find a place; most of them are mentioned in the Further Reading at the end of the introduction to each part.

Each part has an introduction designed to give students an overview of the material it contains that will help them navigate through it. The philosophy of action is a fast-growing field that cuts across a large number of philosophical and scientific discourses. We have tried to give a taste of some of the latest research without prioritizing this over the work that has made the subject what it is.

A number of acknowledgments are due: many thanks to several anonymous referees for helping us with the selection and organization of the material included here. We also received sage advice on these matters from Maria Alvarez and John Hyman; Erasmus Mayr gave us timely and perceptive feedback on all of our introductions.

In addition, we are very grateful to John McDowell for allowing us to include a new recension of some of his recent work on intention. For correspondence and permission to make minor editorial changes to their work we should also like to thank Maria Alvarez and John Hyman (again), Michael Bratman, Fred Dretske, Jennifer Hornsby, E. J. Lowe, Joseph Raz, and Michael Smith.

At Wiley-Blackwell we should like to thank Nick Bellorini for commissioning the volume, as well as Lindsay Bourgeois, Jennifer Bray, Liam Cooper, Jeff Dean, and Allison Kostka for their invaluable help and patience throughout. Particular thanks are owed to Christopher Feeney for his meticulous copy-editing and to Joanna Pyke for overseeing everything.

Finally, we owe thanks to our research assistants Robert Vinten and István Zárdai for helping out with the first and last stages of the work. We should not have been able to fund them without generous support from Oxford Brookes University’s Central Research Fund and the Darrell K. Royal Fund at the University of Texas at Austin.

JD & CS

Oxford

Source Acknowledgments

The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

Wittgenstein, L. (2009),

Philosophical Investigations

§§611–628 (omitting 626), 4th edn., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell). © 2009 by Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Davidson, D. (1971), “Agency,” in R. Binkley, R. Bronaugh, and A. Marras (eds.),

Agent, Action, and Reason

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 3–25. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Bennett, J. (1973), “Shooting, Killing and Dying,”

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

2 (3), 315–323. Published by University of Calgary Press. © Jonathan Bennett. Reprinted with kind permission of the author.

Frankfurt, H. G. (1978), “The Problem of Action,”

American Philosophical Quarterly

15 (2), 157–162. Reprinted with permission.

Alvarez, M., and Hyman, J. (1998), “Agents and their Actions,”

Philosophy

73 (2), 219–245. Published by Cambridge Journals, Cambridge. © Royal Institute of Philosophy 1996. Reproduced with permission.

Hornsby, J. (2004), “Agency and Actions,” in J. Hyman and H. Steward (eds.),

Agency and Action

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1–23. © Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2004. Published by Cambridge University Press. Reproduced with permission.

Prichard, H. A. (1945), “Acting, Willing, Desiring,” in

Moral Obligation

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 272–281. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Ryle, G. (1949), “The Will,” in

The Concept of Mind

, 60th anniversary edn. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 62–74. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Books.

Hornsby, J. (1980), “Acting and Trying to Act,” in

Actions

(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 33–45. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Books.

Lowe, E. J. (1996), “Action and Volition,” in

Subjects of Experience

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 140–156. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996. Reproduced with permission.

Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957),

Intention

§§1–9 (omitting 2 and parts of 8) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), 1–16. Copyright © 1957, 1963 by G. E. M. Anscombe. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Donnellan, K. S. (1963), “Knowing What I Am Doing,”

Journal of Philosophy

60 (14), 401–409. Reprinted with permission of The Journal of Philosophy.

Davidson, D. (1978), “Intending,” in Y. Yovel and D. Reidel (eds.),

Philosophy of History and Action

(Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University), 41–60. First published by D. Reidel. Reprinted with permission of Springer.

Bratman, M. (1984), “Two Faces of Intention,”

Philosophical Review

93 (3), 375–405. Copyright © 1984 Cornell University. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder and current publisher Duke University Press,

www.dukeupress.edu

.

McDowell, J. (2009), “Acting As One Intends.” This chapter was prepared by Jonathan Dancy from McDowell’s Hägerström Lectures, given at Uppsala University in 2005. © John McDowell. Reprinted with kind permission of the author.

Knobe, J. (2003), “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language,”

Analysis

63 (3), 190–194. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Kavka, G. S. (1983), “The Toxin Puzzle,”

Analysis

43 (1), 33–36. Published by Oxford Journals, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Stoutland, F. (2008), “The Ontology of Social Agency,”

Analyse & Kritik

30, 533–551.

Davidson, D. (1963), “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,”

Journal of Philosophy

60 (23), 685–700. Reprinted with permission of The Journal of Philosophy.

Dancy, J. (2000), “How to Act for a Good Reason,” excerpts from

Practical Reality

(Oxford: Oxford University Press), chs. 5 and 6. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Korsgaard, C. (2008), “Acting for a Reason,” in

The Constitution of Agency

(Oxford: Oxford University Press), 207–229. © C. Korsgaard 2008. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Hursthouse, R. (1981), “Arational Actions,”

Journal of Philosophy

88 (2), 57–68. Reprinted with permission of Rosalind Hursthouse and The Journal of Philosophy.

Raz, J. (2001), “Agency, Reason, and the Good,” in

Engaging Reason

(Oxford: Oxford University Press), 22–45. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Watson, G. (1977), “Skepticism about Weakness of Will,”

Philosophical Review

86 (3), 316–339. Copyright © 1977 Cornell University. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder and the present publisher, Duke University Press,

www.dukeupress.edu

.

Hempel, C. G. (1963), “Explanation in Science and in History §§1–3,” in Robert G. Colodny (ed.),

Frontiers of Science and Philosophy

(Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press), 276–284. Reprinted with permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Dray, W. (1957), “The Rationale of Actions,” in

Laws and Explanation in History

(Oxford: Oxford University Press), 118–137. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Hempel, C. G. (1963), “Explanation in Science and in History §§4–7,” in Robert G. Colodny (ed.),

Frontiers of Science and Philosophy

(Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press), 284–296. Reprinted with permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Smith, M. (2009), “The Explanatory Role of Being Rational,” in D. Sobel and S. Wall (eds.),

Reasons for Action

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 58–80. © Cambridge University Press 2009. Reprinted with permission.

Malcolm, N. (1968), “The Conceivability of Mechanism,”

Philosophical Review

77 (1), 45–72 (omitting final section).

Philosophical Review

is published by Duke University Press, Durham, N.C.

Collins, A. W. (1984), “Action, Causality, and Teleological Explanation,”

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

9 (1), 345–369. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Dretske, F. (2004), “Psychological vs. Biological Explanations of Behavior,”

Behavior and Philosophy

32 (1), 167–177.

Behavior and Philosophy

is published by the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. Reprinted with permission.

Chisholm, R. (1964), “Human Freedom and the Self,” in

The Lindley Lectures

(Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas), 3–15. Reprinted with permission of The University of Kansas.

Frankfurt, H. G. (1969), “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,”

Journal of Philosophy

66 (23), 829–839. Reprinted with permission of Harry Frankfurt and The Journal of Philosophy.

Fischer, J. M. (1997), “Responsibility, Control, and Omissions,”

Journal of Ethics

1 (1), 45–64. Reprinted with permission of Springer.

Strawson, G. (2011), “The Impossibility of Ultimate Responsibility?,” in R. Swinburne (ed.),

Free Will and Modern Science

(Oxford: Oxford University Press), 126–140. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Steward, H. (2011), “Moral Responsibility and the Concept of Agency,” in R. Swinburne (ed.),

Free Will and Modern Science

(Oxford: Oxford University Press), 141–157. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Mele, A. R. (2011), “Free Will and Science,” in R. Kane (ed.),

The Oxford Handbook of Free Will

, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 499–514. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

1Philosophical Investigations §§611–628

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein, L. (2009), Philosophical Investigations §§611–628 (omitting 626), 4th edn., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell). © 2009 by Blackwell Publishing. Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

611. “Willing – wanting – too is merely an experience,” one would like to say (the ‘will’ too only ‘idea’). It comes when it comes, and I cannot bring it about. Not bring it about? – Like what? What can I bring about, then? What am I comparing it with when I say this?

612. I wouldn’t say of the movement of my arm, for example, that it comes when it comes, and so on. And this is the domain in which it makes sense to say that something doesn’t simply happen to us, but that we do it. “I don’t need to wait for my arm to rise – I can raise it.” And here I am making a contrast between the movement of my arm and, say, the fact that the violent thudding of my heart will subside.

613. In the sense in which I can ever bring about anything (such as stomach-ache through overeating), I can also bring about wanting. In this sense, I bring about wanting to swim by jumping into the water. I suppose I was trying to say: I can’t want to want; that is, it makes no sense to speak of wanting to want. “Wanting” is not the name of an action, and so not of a voluntary one either. And my use of a wrong expression came from the fact that one is inclined to think of wanting as an immediate non-causal bringing about. But a misleading analogy lies at the root of this idea; the causal nexus seems to be established by a mechanism connecting two parts of a machine. The connection may be disrupted if the mechanism malfunctions. (One thinks only of the normal ways in which a mechanism goes wrong, not, say, of cog-wheels suddenly going soft, or penetrating each other, and so on.)

614. When I raise my arm ‘voluntarily’, I don’t make use of any means to bring the movement about. My wish is not such a means either.

615. “Willing, if it is not to be a sort of wishing, must be the action itself. It mustn’t stop anywhere short of the action.” If it is the action, then it is so in the ordinary sense of the word; so it is speaking, writing, walking, lifting a thing, imagining something. But it is also striving, trying, making an effort – to speak, to write, to lift a thing, to imagine something, and so on.

616. When I raise my arm, I have not wished it to rise. The voluntary action excludes this wish. It is, however, possible to say: “I hope I shall draw the circle faultlessly.” And that is to express a wish that one’s hand should move in such-and-such a way.

617. If we cross our fingers in a special way, we are sometimes unable to move a particular finger when someone tells us to do so, if he only points to the finger – merely shows it to the eye. However, if he touches it, we can move it. One would like to describe this experience as follows: we are unable to will to move the finger. The case is quite different from that in which we are not able to move the finger because someone is, say, holding it. One is now inclined to describe the former case by saying: one can’t find any point of application for the will until the finger is touched. Only when one feels the finger can the will know where it is to engage. – But this way of putting it is misleading. One would like to say: “How am I to know where I am to catch hold with the will, if the feeling does not indicate the place?” But then how do I know to what point I am to direct the will when the feeling is there? It is experience that shows that in this case the finger is, as it were, paralysed until we feel a touch on it; it could not have been known a priori.

618. One imagines the willing subject here as something without any mass (without any inertia), as a motor which has no inertia in itself to overcome. And so it is only mover, not moved. That is: one can say “I will, but my body does not obey me” – but not: “My will does not obey me.” (Augustine) But in the sense in which I can’t fail to will, I can’t try to will either.

619. And one might say: “It is only inasmuch as I can never try to will that I can always will.”

620. Doing itself seems not to have any experiential volume. It seems like an extensionless point, the point of a needle. This point seems to be the real agent – and what happens in the realm of appearances merely consequences of this doing. “I do” seems to have a definite sense, independently of any experience.

621. But there is one thing we shouldn’t overlook: when ‘I raise my arm’, my arm rises. And now a problem emerges: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm rises from the fact that I raise my arm? ( (Are the kinaesthetic sensations my willing?) )

622. When I raise my arm, I don’t usually try to raise it.

623. “I want to get to that house at all costs.” – But if there is no difficulty about it, can I strive at all costs to get to the house?

624. In the laboratory, when subjected to an electric current, for example, someone with his eyes shut says “I am moving my arm up and down” – though his arm is not moving. “So”, we say, “he has the special feeling of making that movement.” – Move your arm to and fro with your eyes shut. And now try, while you do so, to talk yourself into the idea that your arm is staying still and that you are only having certain strange feelings in your muscles and joints!

625. “How do you know that you’ve raised your arm?” – “I feel it.” So what you recognize is the feeling? And are you certain that you recognize it right? – You’re certain that you’ve raised your arm; isn’t this the criterion, the measure, of recognizing? […]

627. Consider the following description of a voluntary action: “I form the decision to pull the bell at 5 o’clock; and when it strikes 5, my arm makes this movement.” – Is that the correct description, and not this one: “… and when it strikes 5, I raise my arm”? — One would like to supplement the first description: “And lo and behold! my arm goes up when it strikes 5.” And this “lo and behold!” is precisely what doesn’t belong here. I do not say “Look, my arm is going up!” when I raise it.

628. So one might say: voluntary movement is marked by the absence of surprise. And now I don’t mean you to ask “But why isn’t one surprised here?”

Part IAction and Agency

Introduction to Part I

1.

Although accounts of action have been central to most philosophical systems from Plato to Kant, it is only in recent years (following the writings of Wittgenstein and Anscombe, Chapters 1 and 11) that philosophy of action has come to be seen as a subject in its own right. We begin this volume with enquiries into what we might call the most basic question in this area of study: what is action?

One obvious suggestion is that action is bodily motion. But not all bodily motion is action; when you jog my arm, the motion of my arm is not an action of mine – I haven’t moved my arm – and it isn’t an action of yours, either. So what is the difference between those bodily motions that are actions and those that are not? The most popular strategy is to adopt a causal theory, whereby the distinction between actions and other forms of behavior lies in their causal origins; a sneeze, for instance, is typically not going to count as an action, because it has the wrong sort of cause. So which causes are of the right sort? Davidson’s influential answer to this question identifies the causes of action with (the onset of) beliefs and pro-attitudes (such as desires, preferences, and values) that rationalize the action, that is, show how the action that is their effect made sense to the agent, and so can be thought of as the agent’s reasons for doing what he did (see Chapter 19). Most sneezes are not actions, because they are not caused by rationalizing beliefs and desires, but by such things as tickles. Davidson saw this account as an improvement on earlier views which identified the causes in question with inner acts of will. His view is a form of event-causalism (since the action is an event and its causes are events, too), and due to its prominence in the literature is frequently also referred to as ‘the standard view’.

Event-causalism faces two general challenges. The first, recognized by Davidson himself, is that the right sort of cause (viz. a ‘rationalizing’ one) can bring about an action in the wrong sort of way (i.e. not in virtue of its rationalizing power). So we don’t just need things of the right sort to do the causing, we need them to do their causing in the right sort of way. Davidson (Chapter 2) gives the now famous example of a climber who wants to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and who knows that the way to do this is to let go of the rope; but if this belief and desire together so unnerve him that his grip relaxes and the rope slips through his fingers, the loosening of the grip is something that happens to him rather than something that he does; so it is not an action of his even though it is caused by a rationalizing belief-desire combination (Davidson 1973). This has come to be known as the problem of deviant causes (addressed by Smith in Chapter 28).

The second challenge to event-causalism relates to the lack of any causal role played by agents themselves in all this. If actions are events caused by (the onset of) prior mental states and/or neural processes, we arguably lose sight of what, if any, role we play in all this. If we are not ourselves actively involved, are we really the agents of our own actions or are we mere vehicles for them? It seems insufficient for agency that the causes in question occur inside us. Our digestive processes, for example, are alien to our agency in a way in which our actions had better not be. This worry has come to be known as the problem of ‘the disappearing agent’; it affects any account that, like Davidson’s, understands actions as a species of events, viz. ones with a cause that is not identified with the agent. This problem is the focus of Hornsby’s contribution in this part (Chapter 6). (There are other challenges to the details of Davidson’s view, which are discussed in Parts IV and V.)

So an alternative strategy that is not event-causalist – and is sometimes even misleadingly described as non-causalist – identifies the cause with the agent himself (Chisholm 1964; Reid 1969; O’Connor 2000) rather than with some event. This idea, known as agent-causation, is thought to avoid the two problems discussed above. Agent-causalists disagree over whether the agent causes her action or whether the action consists in her causing a certain result (the latter is argued by Alvarez and Hyman in Chapter 5). But either way, there is the further question of whether an agent’s causing something should itself be understood as an event, and if so, what, if anything, brings about that event. (Ruben 2003 denies that there are such events as the causing of things by agents; O’Connor 2000 denies that they need further causes.)

Not everybody agrees that action is bodily motion with a particular kind of cause. For instance Frankfurt (Chapter 4) defends the non-causalist view that what makes a bodily motion of yours an action is that you are embracing it as your own and that it occurs under your guidance. On this account there can be actions that do not involve the causation of bodily motion at all, so long they are embraced by the agent in the relevant way. Examples of such actions might be pressing one’s hand against a door to keep it closed, refraining from apologizing, and omitting to send a card. In addition, some ‘volitionist’ philosophers identify actions not with bodily motions, however caused, but with the inner causes of those motions, which they take to be acts of will or volitions. Other volitionists take actions to be complex events composed of volitions followed (causally or otherwise) by bodily movements; on this view neither the volition nor the bodily motion is itself an action. These and other related views will be considered in more detail in the introduction to Part II.

Whatever the causes of action may be, most of the above views seem to identify actions themselves with events of some sort. But some thinkers identify actions with processes rather than events. The precise difference between the two characterizations is contentious, but it is generally agreed that – unlike events – processes need not occur throughout or across a temporal stretch (Mourelatos 1978). Dretske (1988) argues that an action is the causal process of a mental/neural event causing a bodily event. More recent process-theorists inspired by Aristotle (e.g. Stout 1997) prefer to think of actions as non-causal processes. These are teleological processes defined by an end or goal that need not be achieved in order for it to be true that the process has taken place. One may, for example, be in the process of baking a cake without ever succeeding in baking one, or crossing the road without ever making it to the other side. So understood, there can be cake-baking or road-crossing processes without there having been a cake-baking or road-crossing event.

Whether actions are events or processes, it may seem that they are at least occurrences or happenings. In Anscombe’s terms, “I do what happens … there is no distinction between my doing and the things happening” (1957: §29). On this outlook, the problem of action we have been dealing with is that of offering a way of distinguishing the doings of an agent from what ‘merely’ happens to him (see the chapter by Frankfurt in this part). But even this framework can be, and has been, rejected. Some philosophers take actions to be instances of relations (e.g. Hyman 2001). Others remind us that to act is to do something (e.g. bring about x) and then proceed to distinguish between the thing done (the deed?) and the event of one’s doing it (Macmurray 1938; Hornsby 1980; Ricœur 1986). This distinction is often compared to that between the thing thought and one’s thinking it, or between the thing said and one’s saying it.

2.

The term ‘basic action’ was first introduced by Danto, in his 1963 paper “What We Can Do.” Danto’s goal was to identify the point at which agency begins (and arguably freedom and moral responsibility with it, but see the discussion of these issues in our introduction to Part VI). Danto’s governing thought is that no matter how complex the action I am doing, there must always be a basic element to it, viz. something by doing which I do everything else that I am doing. But the notion of the basic needs careful handing everywhere in philosophy, not least in the case of basic action. Baier (1971) has raised the worry that there are at least eight kinds of basicness, some of which are a matter of degree rather than kind: causally basic, instrumentally basic, conventionally basic, ontologically basic, logically basic, genetically basic, ease basic, and isolation basic. If so, we need to be sure which one of these we are talking about. Danto’s own example of a paradigmatic basic action is that of moving an arm “without having to do anything to cause it to move” (so pushing it with the other arm won’t count). Volitionists, by contrast, maintain that such an action as moving one’s arm is the effect of a volition; this volition is the basic action and its effect, the moving of the arm, is another action (done by means of the basic action of willing).

Chisholm has offered an alternative, teleological, definition of basic action intended to be neutral on these issues of causality: “‘A is performed by the agent as a basic act’ could be defined as: the agent succeeds in making A happen, and there is no B, other than A, which he undertook to make happen with an end to making A happen” (Chisholm 1964: 617, n.7). But it seems odd to talk of succeeding in making one’s own actions happen. In later works Danto himself replaces all talk of causal or temporal basicness with the notion of mediation: “Actions we do but not through any distinct thing which we also do … I shall call basic, and mediated ones are accordingly non-basic” (Danto 1973).

A remaining and persistent difficulty with any non-teleological view of basicness is that in order to locate those actions that are basic, we need a principle of action individuation. Anscombe (in §26 of Intention) and Davidson (in numerous works, including “Agency”) famously argued that the basicness of an action is sensitive to our description of it. This account falls out of the more general position that actions are events with an indefinite number of descriptions, each of which will highlight some psychological and/or physical feature(s) of the event in question.

For example, suppose that Donald poisons the inhabitants by replenishing the water supply, and that he does the latter by operating the pump, which in turn he does by moving his arm in a particular way. Arguably, what we have here is not four actions but one action with four different descriptions, viz. those of poisoning, replenishing, pumping, and moving. (It is not equally plausible that all by-relations operate in this way; if I win an award by performing well in a contest, my performing well is not my winning.) One of these descriptions is the most basic description of the action, and the ‘by-relation’ may tell us which it is. Donald poisoned by pumping, he did not pump by poisoning.

So how many actions has Donald performed, four or one? As we have seen, Anscombe and Davidson argued that what we have here is not so much four actions as four different descriptions of one action. According to this ‘reductionist’ view, being basic is a matter of description. Davidson accordingly maintains that all actions are basic or ‘primitive’ under some description, since, strictly speaking, “we never do more than move our bodies: the rest is up to nature” (“Agency”, p. 18 in this volume). By contrast, ‘pluralists’ or ‘multipliers’ such as Goldman (1970) and Thomson (1971) argue that each of the above descriptions picks out a different action, and that only one of them (at most) is basic. Hornsby (1979) rejects the labels ‘unifiers’ and ‘multipliers’ in favor of ‘identifiers’ and ‘differentiators’ on the grounds that the former pair serves to conflate identity criteria with counting questions that do not obviously apply to action.

3.

A related debate focuses not on the number of actions performed but on their spatio-temporal location. Suppose that Bob Marley shot the sheriff at time t1, but that the sheriff only died at a later time t3, before which – at time t2 – Marley recorded his famous song. Did Marley kill the sheriff before or after recording his song (he certainly didn’t do it while singing)? It seems as implausible to claim (with the differentiators) that Marley did not kill the sheriff until t3 – after he had left the scene of the crime – as it would be to follow identifiers in maintaining that he killed the sheriff at t1 – before the sheriff died. It is often objected (for instance by Bennett, Chapter 3) that the implausibility of the latter claim is not (genuinely) ontological but (merely) a linguistic oddity. We do not call a woman a mother before she has any children, yet we may, after the birth or adoption of her first child, legitimately speak of what this ‘mother’ did before she had any children. By the same token (or so the argument goes), while we cannot at t1 (while the sheriff was still alive) truthfully say that Marley killed the sheriff, at t3 (when the sheriff is dead) it becomes perfectly acceptable to talk of Marley ‘killing’ him at t1 (before he died).

A different strategy is to distinguish between the cause of the sheriff’s death, namely the shooting, from the logically related (yet distinct) causing of his death, namely the killing. While it is arguably acceptable to conceive of both these things as ‘events’ of people acting, it would be problematic to think of the causing of an event as something which could itself be brought about. Finally, it has been argued (e.g. by Dretske 1988) that while causings can be located in time and space, we cannot always do so in a fine-grained manner. To insist on a more precise temporal location is as silly as insisting that the killing must have also had a spatial location which is smaller than, say, that of a tin of soup. If Marley shot the sheriff in March 1973 (before recording his song about it in April 1973), and if the sheriff (unlike the deputy) did not die until November 1973 (after the hit record was released), then we can truthfully (and informatively) say that Marley killed the sheriff in 1973, though we cannot be any more specific than that. Finally, the temporal location of any given event at a certain time does not imply that it must have been occurring continuously throughout that period (consider chess matches, for example).

References

Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957),

Intention

(Oxford: Blackwell).

Baier, A. (1971), “The Search for Basic Actions,”

American Philosophical Quarterly

8 (2), 161–170.

Chisholm, R. M. (1964), “The Descriptive Element in the Concept of Action,”

Journal of Philosophy

61 (20), 613–624.

Danto, A. C. (1963), “What We Can Do,”

Journal of Philosophy

60 (15), 435–445.

Danto, A. C. (1973),

Analytical Philosophy of Action

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Davidson, D. (1973), “Freedom to Act”; reprinted in

Essays on Actions and Events

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 63–82.

Dretske, F. (1988),

Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).

Goldman, A. I. (1970),

A Theory of Human Action

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).

Hornsby, J. (1979), “Actions and Identities,”

Analysis

39 (4), 195–201.

Hornsby, J. (1980),

Actions

(London: Routledge).

Hyman, J. (2001), “-Ings and -ers,”

Ratio

14 (4), 298–317.

Macmurray, J. (1938), “What is Action?,”

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume

17, 69–85.

Mourelatos, A. P. D. (1978), “Events, States, and Processes,”

Linguistics and Philosophy

2 (3), 415–434.

O’Connor, T. (2000),

Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will

(Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Reid, T. (1969),

Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind

, ed. B. A. Brody (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press).

Ricœur, P. (1986/1991),

From Text to Action

, trans. K. Blamey and J. B. Thompson (London: The Athlone Press).

Ruben, D.-H. (2003),

Action and its Explanation

(Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Stout, R. (1997), “Processes,”

Philosophy

72 (279) (Jan.), 19–27.

Thomson, J. J. (1971), “The Time of a Killing,”

Journal of Philosophy

68 (5), 115–132.

Further Reading

Danto, A. C. (1965), “Basic Actions,”

American Philosophical Quarterly

2 (2), 141–148.

Davidson, D. (1969), “The Individuation of Events”; reprinted in his

Essays on Actions and Events

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 163–180.

Mayr, E. (2011),

Understanding Human Agency

(Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Thompson, M. (2008),

Life and Action

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press).

von Wright, G. H. (1963),

Norm and Action

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

2Agency

Donald Davidson

Davidson, D. (1971), “Agency,” in R. Binkley, R. Bronaugh, and A. Marras (eds.), Agent, Action, and Reason (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 3–25. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

What events in the life of a person reveal agency; what are his deeds and his doings in contrast to mere happenings in his history; what is the mark that distinguishes his actions?

This morning I was awakened by the sound of someone practising the violin. I dozed a bit, then got up, washed, shaved, dressed, and went downstairs, turning off a light in the hall as I passed. I poured myself some coffee, stumbled on the edge of the dining room rug, and spilled a bit of coffee fumbling for the New York Times.

Some of these items record things I did; others, things that befell me, things that happened to me on the way to the dining room. Among the things I did were get up, wash, shave, go downstairs, and spill a bit of coffee. Among the things that happened to me were being awakened and stumbling on the edge of the rug. A borderline case, perhaps, is dozing. Doubts could be kindled about other cases by embroidering on the story. Stumbling can be deliberate, and when so counts as a thing done. I might have turned off the light by inadvertently brushing against the switch; would it then have been my deed, or even something that I did?

Many examples can be settled out of hand, and this encourages the hope that there is an interesting principle at work, a principle which, if made explicit, might help explain why the difficult cases are difficult. On the other side a host of cases raise difficulties. The question itself seems to go out of focus when we start putting pressure on such phrases as “what he did,” “his actions,” “what happened to him,” and it often matters to the appropriateness of the answer what form we give the question. (Waking up is something I did, perhaps, but not an action.) We should maintain a lively sense of the possibility that the question with which we began is, as Austin suggested, a misguided one.1

In this essay, however, I once more try the positive assumption, that the question is a good one, that there is a fairly definite subclass of events which are actions. The costs are the usual ones: oversimplification, the setting aside of large classes of exceptions, the neglect of distinctions hinted by grammar and common sense, recourse to disguised linguistic legislation. With luck we learn something from such methods. There may, after all, be important and general truths in this area, and if there are how else will we discover them?

Philosophers often seem to think that there must be some simple grammatical litmus of agency, but none has been discovered. I drugged the sentry, I contracted malaria, I danced, I swooned, Jones was kicked by me, Smith was outlived by me: this is a series of examples designed to show that a person named as subject in sentences in the active, whether or not the verb is transitive, or as object in the passive, may or may not be the agent of the event recorded.2

Another common error is to think verbs may be listed according to whether they do or do not impute agency to a subject or object. What invites the error is that this is true of some verbs. To say of a person that he blundered, insulted his uncle, or sank the Bismark is automatically to convict him of being the author of those events; and to mention someone in the subject position in a sentence with the verb in the passive tense is, so far as I can see, to ensure that he is not the agent. But for a host of cases, a sentence can record an episode in the life of the agent and leave us in the dark as to whether it was an action. Here are some examples: he blinked, rolled out of bed, turned on the light, coughed, squinted, sweated, spilled the coffee, and tripped over the rug. We know whether these events are actions only after we know more than the verb provides. By considering the additional information that would settle the matter, we may find an answer to the question of what makes a bit of biography an action.

One hint was given in my opening fragmentary diary. Tripping over a rug is normally not an action; but it is if done intentionally. Perhaps, then, being intentional is the relevant distinguishing mark. If it were, it would help explain why some verbs imply agency, for some verbs describe actions that cannot be anything but intentional; asserting, cheating, taking a square root, and lying are examples.

This mark will not work, however, for although intention implies agency, the converse does not hold. Thus spilling the coffee, sinking the Bismark, and insulting someone are all things that may or may not be done intentionally, but even when not intentional, they are normally actions. If, for example, I intentionally spill the contents of my cup, mistakenly thinking it is tea when it is coffee, then spilling the coffee is something I do, it is an action of mine, though I do not do it intentionally. On the other hand, if I spill the coffee because you jiggle my hand, I cannot be called the agent. Yet while I may hasten to add my excuse, it is not incorrect, even in this case, to say I spilled the coffee. Thus we must distinguish three situations in which it is correct to say I spilled the coffee: in the first, I do it intentionally; in the second I do not do it intentionally but it is my action (I thought it was tea); in the third it is not my action at all (you jiggle my hand).3

Certain kinds of mistake are particularly interesting: misreading a sign, misinterpreting an order, underestimating a weight, or miscalculating a sum. These are things that strictly speaking cannot be done intentionally. One can pretend to misread a sign, one can underestimate a weight through sloth or inattention, or deliberately write down what one knows to be a wrong answer to an addition; but none of these is an intentional flubbing. To make a mistake of one of the mentioned kinds is to fail to do what one intends, and one cannot, Freudian paradox aside, intend to fail. These mistakes are not intentional, then; nevertheless, they are actions. To see this we need only notice that making a mistake must in each case be doing something else intentionally. A misreading must be a reading, albeit one that falls short of what was wanted; misinterpreting an order is a case of interpreting it (and with the intention of getting it right); underestimating is estimating; and a miscalculation is a calculation (though one that founders).

Can we now say what element is common to the cases of agency? We know that intentional acts are included, and that the place to look to find what such acts share with the others is at the coffee spillings and such where we can distinguish spillings that involve agency from those that do not. I am the agent if I spill the coffee meaning to spill the tea, but not if you jiggle my hand. What is the difference? The difference seems to lie in the fact that in one case, but not in the other, I am intentionally doing something. My spilling the contents of my cup was intentional; as it happens, this very same act can be redescribed as my spilling the coffee. Of course, thus redescribed the action is no longer intentional; but this fact is apparently irrelevant to the question of agency.

And so I think we have one correct answer to our problem: a man is the agent of an act if what he does can be described under an aspect that makes it intentional.

The possibility of this answer turns on the semantic opacity, or intensionality, of attributions of intention. Hamlet intentionally kills the man behind the arras, but he does not intentionally kill Polonius. Yet Polonius is the man behind the arras, and so Hamlet’s killing of the man behind the arras is identical with his