Agents’ Abilities
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Romy Jaster
About this book
Almost everyone can run. Only very few can run a marathon. But what is it for agents to be able to do things? This question, while central to many debates in philosophy, is still awaiting a comprehensive answer. The book provides just that. Drawing on some valuable insights from previous works of abilities and making use of possible world semantics, Jaster develops the "success view", a view on which abilities are a matter of successful behavior. Along the way, she explores the gradable nature of abilities, the contextsensitivity of ability statements, the difference between general and specific abilities, the relationship between abilities and dispositions, and the ability to act otherwise. The book is mandatory reading for anyone working on abilities, and provides valuable insights for anyone dealing with agents' abilities in other fields of philosophy.
For this book, Romy Jaster has received both the Wolfgang Stegmüller Prize and the De Gruyter Prize for Analytical Philosophy of Mind or Metaphysics/Ontology.
Author / Editor information
Topics
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Frontmatter
I -
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Acknowledgements
VII -
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Contents
IX -
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Introduction
1 -
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1 Methodology
16 -
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2 The simple conditional analysis
38 -
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3 Possibilism
63 -
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4 The success view I – Agentive abilities
92 -
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5 The success view II – Non‐agentive abilities
154 -
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6 The success view situated
180 -
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7 The success view applied – Two rough sketches
214 -
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Resumé and an open question
225 -
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References
229 -
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Index of Names
234 -
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Index of subjects
236
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