Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Philosophy of action is a branch of philosophy. It is chiefly concerned with human action, intending to distinguish between activity and passivity, voluntary, intentional, culpable and involuntary actions, and related question. The field is often defined by the quote of Wittgenstein: "What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?" The problems of analytical philosophy of action include: What are the temporal limits of an action? For instance, can an action end before its result occurs? Is an action the same as some bodily movement? Does one movement under different descriptions constitute different actions? Is an action the same as some event? Does one event under different descriptions constitute different actions? References: Philosophy of Action conference announcement: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lawf0081/rip/ Philosophy of Action syllabus: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~velleman/542/ Mele, Alfred (ed.): The Philosophy of Action, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Action, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/action/ This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.