Essays on Actions and Events

A collection of Davidson's essays on action, events and the mind, arranged in three groups. The first, on intention and action, opens with 'Actions, Reasons, and Causes' (1963), which argued against the then dominant view that reasons cannot be causes: to explain an action by the agent's reasons is to give a causal explanation, the reason being a pairing of a desire with a belief. 'How is Weakness of the Will Possible?' explains how someone can act against their own best judgement. The second group, on events and cause, includes 'The Logical Form of Action Sentences', which treats events as particulars that sentences quantify over, an idea now standard in linguistic semantics, and essays on causal relations and on how events are individuated. The third group, on the philosophy of psychology, contains 'Mental Events', which defends anomalous monism: every mental event is a physical event, yet there are no strict laws linking mental and physical descriptions, and this is compatible with human freedom.

These essays set the agenda for the philosophy of action and gave the mind–body debate one of its most discussed positions, anomalous monism.