Mental Action and the Conscious Mind (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy)

Mental action deserves a place among foundational topics in action theory and philosophy of mind.Recent accounts of human agency tend to overlook the role of conscious mental action in our daily lives, while contemporary accounts of the conscious mind often ignore the role of mental action and agency in shaping consciousness.This collection aims to establish the centrality of mental action for discussions of agency and mind.The thirteen original essays provide a wide-ranging vision of the various and nuanced philosophical issues at stake.Among the questions explored by the contributors are:Which aspects of our conscious mental lives are agential?Can mental action be reduced to and explained in terms of non-agential mental states, processes, or events?Must mental action be included among the ontological categories required for understanding and explaining the conscious mind more generally?Does mental action have implications for related topics, such as attention, self-knowledge, self-co