UNCORRECTED PROOF IN DEFENCE OF THE AGENT-CENTRED PERSPECTIVE GIUSEPPINA D’ORO Abstract: This article explores certain issues that arise at the borderline between conceptual analysis and metaphysics, where answers to questions of a conceptual nature compete with answers to questions of an ontological or metaphysical nature. I focus on the way in which three philosophers, Kant, Collingwood and Davidson, articulate the relationship between the conceptual question ‘‘What are actions?’’ and the metaphysical question ‘‘How is agency possible?’’ I argue that the way in which one handles the relationship between the conceptual and the ontological question has important implications for one’s conception of the nature of philosophy, and that thinking hard about what it takes to defend the autonomy of the mental and of the agent-centred perspective should force us to think about our underlying conception of philosophy and to choose between one that understands it as first science and one that understands it as the under- labourer of science. Keywords: Davidson, Collingwood, reasons and causes, autonomy of the mental. There are two main ways of understanding and defending the notion of agent-centredness. One revolves around the view that the perspective of the agent consists in an inner world of qualitative experiences that are inaccessible from a third-person perspective. Philosophers like Nagel belong to this tradition. 1 The other claims that the perspective of agency has to do not with a privileged observational standpoint but with ‘‘the space of reasons,’’ and that the relevant distinction is not between the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective but between the domain of reasons, which is normative, and that of nature, which is not. It is an unargued assumption of this article that the perspective of agency is captured by the notion of reason giving; accordingly, I shall say nothing further about the tradition to which Nagel belongs. I shall discuss instead the views of three philosophers who agree that the agent-centred perspective is appropriately captured by the idea of reason and is therefore ineradicably normative. The philosophers at stake are the Kant of the Groundwork, Collingwood as reconstructed by Dray, and the Davidson of Actions and Events. META03605009 B Dispatch: 17.8.05 Journal: META CE: Blackwell Journal Name Manuscript No. Author Received: No. of pages: 16 PE: SVK/VK 1 See, for instance, ‘‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’’ in Nagel 1979. r Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 36, No. 5, October 2005 0026-1068 r Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005 (BWUK META 03605009.PDF 17-Aug-05 14:54 132855 Bytes 16 PAGES n operator=VinodK) META 03605009