Sartre and Action Theory

Abstract

The name 'action theory' is new. But what goes by that name subsumes work of very nearly all of the great philosophers of the past and present. The new name corresponds to a new sort of interest in an account of action (which would seem to have grown up in the wake of linguistic philosophy). Action theorists would still like to be able to answer the age old questions about what our freedom consists in, about what the place is of human agency in the world of nature, about what is distinctive in an agent's perspective. But those who have been dubbed action theorists have a new concern with offering universal answers to some questions about human action which taken case by case are minute, and taken in isolation can seem uninteresting. If the new style of action theory has anything to be said in its favour, then answers to these questions provide a background for a correct broader, if less theoretical, view. According to this reckoning, Sartre is an action theorist. But he is certainly not one of those who have concerned themselves with the questions that have given rise to the title 'action theory'. Katherine Morris does us a service in bringing Sartre and the specific preoccupations of contemporary Anglo-American action theory into confrontation.' If we grant only that any truth can cohabit happily with any other truth, then it must be possible to express such insights as Sartre had about human beings without conflicting with any of the claims in the correct theory whichever that may be defended in the Anglo-American tradition. In this reply to Morris, I hope to show that there is not the incompatibility that she claims to see between the particular account of action I defended in Actions and the picture that Sartre paints of our relationship to our bodies.'