John Martin Fischer, the Interview

Check it out here. (Thanks, John.)

Comments

[John Fischer]

I want to emphasize that I was just kind of speaking off the top of my head--there are certainly many interesting works I simply didn't think of immediately; of course, it wasn't supposed to be comprehensive...

A further thought. Intention has been of interest to action theorists for a long time. I think that some of Elizabeth Anscombe's ideas are coming back into vogue in the work of some contemporary writers, particularly the idea that we have some sort of special, non-inferential knowledge of our actions. (It will be interesting to see if issues about act-individuation come back...)

[Andrei Buckareff]

John,

I enjoyed reading your interview. Regarding your last remarks about act-individuation, I think act-individuation and the ontology of action more broadly might be making a slow comeback. Granted, when I posted something on this blog about act-individuation a few months back there was little interest. But I know that Kevin has done some work on this and I believe has stuff in the works. David-Hillel Ruben has a nice chapter in which he defends a "Cambridge-Theory" of act-individuation in his recent book. I'm working on a paper defending the action-event identity thesis against some recent arguments offered by John Hyman, Marial Alvarez, and Kent Bach (although there was a reply to Bach by Michael Zimmerman back in the mid-1990s; but his thesis was really pretty modest--viz., Bach's argument doesn't work). Finally, my friend, Jesus Aguilar, has a paper forthcoming in Dialectica in which he proposes a solution to the problem of interpersonal agency that relies heavily upon accepting a coarse-grained theory of act-individuation. I am not convinced he can get the same results if he accepts a fine-grained view. (So I think that Jesus's work serves as a counterexample to Ginet's claim in On Action that the conclusions we reach about act-individuation do not make much of a real difference for the conclusions we reach elsewhere in the philosophy of action.)

None of this shows that the ontology of action is enjoying a comeback. But there are signs that it is not the dead topic it has been regarded as for some time.