Myles Brand

For those who didn't catch this at Leiter's blog, Myles Brand died today.  For those not familiar with his work, Brand made some major contributions to the philosophy of action before and even while he assumed the role of an administrator in his capacity as President of the University of Oregon, President of Indiana University, and finally as President of the NCAA.  His book, Intending and Acting:Toward a Naturalized Action Theory, still remains one of the most important books in defense of the Causal Theory of Action and belongs on the shelf of anyone doing serious work on human action and agency (even free will).  

While I am not aware of him making any significant contributions to the free will debate, the influence of his work on intentional action is evinced in much recent work on free will.  Brand deserves credit for doing ontologically serious action theory that did not ignore developments in the relevant sciences.  

Comments

[John Fischer]

Yes, thanks for this excellent post, Andrei. Myles Brand did important work on action theory, and h was also a first-class academic administrator. I'm amused at the thought that it took an "Action Theorist" to take action to fire Bobby Knight at IU!

Even when he was busy in top administrative posts, he continued to follow debates in Action Theory, broadly construed to include free will/moral responsibility. He was on the Advisory Board to Philosophy Talk. I doubt that Myles Brand will go down in history for his contributions to Philosophy or Action Theory, as his administrative work is much more salient to the public. But I have always thought it very cool that "one of us" (in some sense) could do so well on the public stage.

[John Fischer]

Another story about Myles Brand. Some years ago UC Riverside made the decision to go Division I in athletics. This is a major transition for any school, and UCR has struggled in some ways, especially given these very difficult financial times. I asked Myles whether he would be willing to come to the campus to discuss the issues involved in making the transition to Division I, and he very kindly and graciously agreed to come, at no cost to the university, and he spent a few days with our faculty, staff, and students.

[Alan]

John, thanks for the memories about Brand. I really respected him on his stand to fire Knight--that took integrity and guts at Indiana. We often recall the abstract written work that philosophers are famous for, but neglect their perhaps more significant life contributions as (sometimes at least) the sort of good and decent person as Brand appaears to have been.

[Al Mele]

Thanks for this post Andrei. Myles's book made a big impact on me back in 1984. (In fact, next week, the students in my grad seminar will be reading a chapter of *Intending and Acting*: ch. 2 on the fundamental problem in action theory, a favorite of mine.) Later, he was kind enough to write letters of recommendation for me for tenure, promotions, and endowed chairs. I had great respect for him, and I liked him very much. Talking philosophy with him was always a real pleasure.

Al Mele