Shaun Gallagher presents a ground-breaking interdisciplinary account of action. He shows that in order to understand human agency and the aspects of mind that are associated with it, we need to grasp the crucial role of context or circumstance in action, and the normative constraints of social and cultural practices.

Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong. He has held visiting positions in Cambridge, Copenhagen, Paris, Lyon, Berlin, Oxford, and Rome. His research areas include phenomenology and philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, theories of self, intersubjectivity, and social cognition. Gallagher held the Humboldt Foundation's Anneliese Maier Research Award (2012-18). He is a founding editor and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. His previous publications include How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford 2005), The Phenomenological Mind (Routledge 2012), and Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford 2017).

• Introduction


• Part I: Action


• 1: Actions and Abstractions


• 2: Time in Action


• 3: Action, Intention, and the Sense of Agency


• Part II: Interaction


• 4: The Case Against Theory of Mind


• 5: The Interaction Theory of Social Cognition


• 6: Direct Social Perception


• 7: Communicative Actions and Narrative Practices


• Part III: A Critical Turn


• 8: Recognition and Critical Interaction Theory


• 9: Telling Actions: Institutions, Collective Agency, and Critical Narratives


• 10: A Practice of Justice