Willing the Good: Empirical Challenges to the Explanation of Human Behavior

Science increasingly deals with human behaviour. Biology, neuroscience, genetics, psychology, evolutionary theory, ethology, all bring new insights into our actions and find out new facts about our agency. However, what is the philosophical significance of their findings? The answer to this question varies according to one's philosophical background. The leading, empiricist view contends that the sciences say (or will one day say) everything about human agency. On a different, anti-empiricist background, though, like an Aristotelian or a Kantian perspective, the results of the sciences acquire a different significance: they contribute to our understanding of agency but cannot reduce it. This collection of original essays brings together a number of experts from different philosophical fields (history of philosophy, philosophy of action, ethics, philosophy of science) to discuss how recent scientific developments about human behaviour may be interpreted by and may be relevant for non-empiricist conceptions of agency. Contributors share the project of reconciling the scientific and the manifest images of the world, by reaching a stereoscopic vision of reality, with the conviction that philosophy is an attempt to establish coherence among our beliefs, while taking, at least prima facie, all the aspects of our experience at face value.