Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson [Hardcover]

How do minds cause events in the world? How doeswantingto write a lettercausea person's hands to move across the page, orbelievingsomething to be truecausea person to make a promise? InActions and Objects, Jonathan Kramnick examines the literature and philosophy of action during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when philosophers and novelists, poets and scientists were all concerned with the place of the mind in the world. These writers asked whether belief, desire, and emotion were part of natureand thus subject to laws of cause and effector in a special place outside the natural order. Kramnick puts particular emphasis on those who tried to make actions compatible with external determination and to blur the boundary between mind and matter. He follows a long tradition of examining the close relation between literary and philosophical writing during the period, but fundamentally revises the terrain. Rather than emphasizing psychological depth and interiority or asking how literary works were understood as true or fictional, he situates literature alongside philosophy as jointly interested in discovering how minds work. As a philosopher and cognitive scientist, I read Jonathan Kramnick's bookActions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardsonwith mounting excitement. He makes a compelling case that Rochester's late-seventeenth-century erotic poetryon such topics as unwelcome episodes of impotence or random sexual encounters in London's public parkscan and should be read as making innovative contributions to then flourishing debates about the nature of mind, the person and agency. What's more, Kramnick shows that these earlier debates continue to shape our engagement today with these same topics. If Kramnick is right, then contemporary philosophy of mind needs to take a new look at these old literatures. But there is a more far-reaching upshot: Kramnick describes a world where there were no sharp lines to belß