Human Agency Par Excellence

Alfred Mele

It is sometimes claimed – for example, by A. I. Melden and Thomas Nagel – that standard causal accounts of action and its explanation leave agents out of the picture, that theorists attracted to these accounts face the problem of the disappearing agent. David Velleman contends that the standard causal story does not capture what “distinguishes human action from other animal behavior” and does not accommodate “human action par excellence” (1992, p. 462). My aim in this paper is to see what can be learned about these philosophers’ worries and about human action from an investigation of human action par excellence.