Manifest Activity presents and critically examines Thomas Reid's
doctrines about the model of human power, the will, our capacities
for purposeful conduct, and the place of our agency in the natural
world. Reid is one of the most important philosophers of the 18th
century, but hitherto under-appreciated; through the reconstruction
of his arguments, many of which have never before been discussed,
Gideon Yaffe demonstrates that Reid's simple prose and direct style
belie the complexity of the views he advocates and the subtlety of
the reasons he offers in their favour. For Reid, contrary to the
view of many of his predecessors, it is simply manifest that we are
active with respect to our behaviours; it is manifest, he thinks,
that our actions are not merely remote products of forces that lie
outside of our control. Reid holds, instead, that actions are all
and only those events that spring from active power, and he
produces insightful and imaginative arguments for the claim that
only a creature with a mind is capable of having active power. He
believes that only human beings, and creatures 'above us', are
capable of directing events towards ends, of endowing them with
purpose or direction, the distinctive feature of action. However,
he also holds that all events, and not merely human actions, are
products of active power, power possessed either by human beings or
by God. This collection of theses leads Reid to the view that human
behaviour and the progress of nature are both essentially
teleological. Patterns in nature are the products of laws of which
God is the author; patterns in human conduct are the products of
character and the laws that individuals set for themselves.
Manifest Activity examines Reid's arguments for this view and the
view's implications for the nature of character, motivation, and
the special kind of causation involved in the production of human
behaviour. Yaffe's assessment will greatly profit anyone working on
current theories of action and free will, as well as historians of
ideas.
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