John Hyman, The Queen's College, Oxford

John Hyman is a Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford, Professor of Aesthetics in the University of Oxford, and Editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics. He held a Getty Scholarship at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in 2001-2002, a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2002-2003, and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2010-2012.

A highly original treatment of the central questions in philosophy of action and epistemology

Will become a landmark publication in the field

At the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy, while deeply informed by historical scholarship

Human agency has four irreducibly different dimensions — psychological, ethical, intellectual, and physical — which the traditional idea of a will tended to conflate. Twentieth-century philosophers criticized the idea that acts are caused by 'willing' or 'volition', but the study of human action continued to be governed by a tendency to equate these dimensions of agency, or to reduce one to another. Cutting across the branches of philosophy, from logic and epistemology to ethics and jurisprudence, Action, Knowledge, and Will defends comprehensive theories of action and knowledge, and shows how thinking about agency in four dimensions deepens our understanding of human conduct and its causes.

Readership: Scholars and students in philosophy of action and epistemology; others interested in understanding the main concepts we use to think and reason about human conduct and its causes.