Topic: Agency and Autonomy

Our reflections will proceed in two stages. In the first, we will
explore a number of concepts connected to the idea of intentional
agency—for example, motivation, motivational strength, desire,
purpose, acting for a reason, self-control, and intention. In the
second stage, we will consider the more ambitious notion of
autonomous agency or free will. Our central question will be whether
autonomous agency can be illuminating analyzed in a way that largely
respects pre-reflective opinion while being consistent with
plausible accounts of what it is to act for a reason. Secondarily,
we shall also ask whether the basic notion of autonomy admits of
more-or-less adequate approximations to an ideal (or more radically,
whether it might admit a plurality of mutually inconsistent
variations), so that ‘freedom with a human face’ might require
rather less than divine freedom.				
						

Texts:
Al Mele, Motivation and Agency (Oxford 2003)
Randolph Clarke, Libertarian Accounts of Free Will (Oxford 2003)