Book Review: The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Agency

Abstract

The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Agency is a new volume in the series Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy, which collects contributions written by leading scholars in both emerging and established fields of philosophical inquiry, aiming to provide accessible yet thorough assessments of problems, themes, thinkers, and recent developments in research.The editors, Christopher Erhard and Tobias Keiling, state that the motivation for editing this volume originates from the desire, expressed by Terry Horgan, John Tienson, and George Grahman in 2003, to overcome a major philosophical blindspot: the widespread and unfortunate ignorance of the phenomenology of agency in philosophy of mind. Notably, in making this desire their own, Erhard and Keiling embark on an even more challenging task than that envisioned by Horgan, Tienson, and Grahman, for they attempt to cover the manifold meanings that are usually associated with "phenomenology." All of the chapters in the volume are related to at least one of three main senses of the term: an historical sense that is associated with "phenomenology" when the concept is used to refer to the philosophical tradition founded by Edmund Husserl; a methodological sense through which "phenomenology" refers to a certain way of doing philosophy; and an experiential sense, which was the sense intended by Horgan, Tienson, and Grahman, according to which "phenomenology" refers to the "what-it-is-like" of having an experience. Depending on which specific sense is taken into consideration, the development of a phenomenology of agency presents one with different themes, problems, and directions of inquiry. Fully aware of this, Erhard and Keiling point out that "although often taken as self-evident, the relation between the historical and the methodological implications of 'phenomenological' philosophy becomes the more controversial the closer one looks" (p. 1). Furthermore, they note that, although there is clearly a connection between what is initially required by a phenomenological account of agency in the experimental sense and Research assistant in DFG-Project "Non-object-directed Intentionality: Tendency and Affect".