Knowledge in Action

What sets intentional actions apart from the rest has long been a central question in the philosophy of action. In this book, Markos Valaris offers a novel answer, grounded in a distinctive 'knowledge-first' conception of agential control. Rejecting decompositional accounts that analyse intentional action into separate mental and bodily components, Valaris argues that control is best understood as a capacity for knowledge of a distinctively practical kind. This framework yields a unified account of intentional action and illuminates several live debates in the field, including the ontology of actions as events, the epistemology of intentional action, and the nature of skill.