5,494 research outputs found
Effort and the Standard Story of Action
In this paper, I present an alternative account of action that improves upon what has come to be known as the standard story. The standard story depicts actions as events that are caused by and made intelligible through the appropriate combinations of the agent’s beliefs, desires, decisions, intentions and other motivational factors. I argue that the standard story is problematic because it depicts the relation between the agent and their bodily actions as causally mediated by their motivational factors. On the alternative account that I present, whenever an agent performs a bodily action, they do so by exerting a distinctive kind of effort so as to initiate, sustain, and control their own bodily capacities, an essential feature of bodily action that is absent from the standard story
Confessions of a Deluded Westerner
In this paper, I aim to make two general points. First, I claim that the discussions in Repetti (2017) assume different, sometimes conflicting, notions of free will, so the guiding question of the book is not as clear as it could be. Second, according to Buddhist tradition, the path to enlightenment requires rejecting the delusional belief in the existence of a persisting self. I claim that if there is no persisting self, there are no intentional actions; and, if there are no intentional actions, there is no hope for Buddhist enlightenment. Thus, rejecting the allegedly delusional belief in a persisting self has disastrous consequences, both for the existence of intentional action and for Buddhist soteriology
Agent causation as a solution to the problem of action
My primary aim is to defend a nonreductive solution to the problem of action. I argue that when you are performing an overt bodily action, you are playing an irreducible causal role in bringing about, sustaining, and controlling the movements of your body, a causal role best understood as an instance of agent causation. Thus, the solution that I defend employs a notion of agent causation, though emphatically not in defence of an account of free will, as most theories of agent causation are. Rather, I argue that the notion of agent causation introduced here best explains how it is that you are making your body move during an action, thereby providing a satisfactory solution to the problem of action
The Infrared Emission from the Narrow Line Region
We present models for the mid- and far- infrared emission from the Narrow
Line Region (NLR) of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). Using the MAPPINGS III code
we explore the effect of typical NLR parameters on the spectral characteristics
of the IR emission. These include useful IR emission line ratio diagnostic
diagrams for the determination of these parameters, as well as Star
formation--AGN mixing diagnostics. We also examine emission line to continuum
correlations which would assist in separating the IR emission arising from the
NLR from that coming from the inner torus. We find for AGN like NGC 1068 and
NGC 4151 that the NLR only contributes ~10% to the total IRAS 25 mum flux, and
that other components such as a dusty torus are necessary to explain the total
AGN IR emission.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in A&A. Paper with
full resolution figures available at
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~brent/publications/bgrovesnlrIRpaper.pd
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