Making the Agent Reappear: How Processes Might Help

This paper argues that the view that actions are processes (rather than events) can help with what is sometimes called the ‘problem of the disappearing agent’. Two versions of this problem are first distinguished – in order to indicate which version of the problem it is which the introduction of processes might be able to allay. The paper then presents the outline of a view of the metaphysics of processes, and suggests some ways in which the idea that actions are processes might help us steer between the Scylla of standard agent causationism and the Charybdis of event-causal conceptions of action.