This collection on the history of philosophy of action since 1500 brings together specialists from both the philosophy of action and the history of philosophy, with the aim of re-assessing the wider philosophical impact of action theory. This book was originally published as a special issue of Philosophical Explorations.

Constantine Sandis is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

Preface Introduction 1. Agents, objects, and their powers in Suarez and Hobbes 2. Human action and virtue in Descartes and Spinoza 3. Action, knowledge and embodiment in Berkeley and Locke 4. Sympathetic action in the seventeenth century: human and natural 5. Hume's better argument for motivational scepticism 6. Kant and Hegel on purposive action 7. Action, interaction and inaction: post-Kantian accounts of thinking, willing, and doing in Fichte and Schopenhauer 8. Nietzsche's account of self-conscious agency 9. Before ethics: scientific accounts of action at the turn of the century 10. The touch of King Midas: Collingwood on why actions are not events 11. Remarks on the "thickness" of action description: with Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Anscombe