Table of Contents

Preface
1: Agency and the Will
2: Action and Integration
3: Acts and Events
4: Voluntariness and Choice
5: Desire and Intention
6: Reason and Knowledge
7: Knowledge as an Ability
8: The Road to Larissa
Appendix: The Modern Theory of the Will
Endnotes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index

About the Author

John Hyman has been a Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford since 1988 and Professor of Aesthetics in the University of Oxford since 2008. He has edited the British Journal of Aesthetics since 2008. He held a Getty Scholarship at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in 2001-2002, a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2002-2003, and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2010-2012.

Reviews

`John Hyman brilliantly tackles a problem that has rankled since Plato: what is involved when we voluntarily perform an action? "The will", he argues, has been made too much of a catch-all of the various dimensions of human agency -- physical, psychological, ethical and intellectual. Philosophy is all about fine distinctions. Here they are made acutely yet accessibly to give us a new picture of who we are.'
Jane O'Grady, The Tablet
`How could knowledge be even better for us than true beliefs that we have good reason to accept? John Hyman answers this question in Action, Knowledge, and Will. It is by no means the only question he answers in this rich, delightful book. He reaches fresh, insightful conclusions about human action and thought by attending to connections between questions usually treated separately. He explains and defends those conclusions sharply and carefully, with
admirable regard for what the words involved in the question actually mean.'
Barry Stroud, Times Literary Supplement