How do minds cause events in the world? How does wanting to write a letter cause a person's hands to move across the page, or believing something to be true cause a person to make a promise? In Actions and Objects, Jonathan Kramnick examines the literature and philosophy of action during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when philosophers and novelists, poets and scientists were all concerned with the place of the mind in the world. These writers asked whether belief, desire, and emotion were part of nature-and thus subject to laws of cause and effect-or in a special place outside the natural order. Kramnick puts particular emphasis on those who tried to make actions compatible with external determination and to blur the boundary between mind and matter. He follows a long tradition of examining the close relation between literary and philosophical writing during the period, but fundamentally revises the terrain. Rather than emphasizing psychological depth and interiority or asking how literary works were understood as true or fictional, he situates literature alongside philosophy as jointly interested in discovering how minds work.
"The legacy of Descartes's mind-body problem looms in this careful examination of Restoration and 18th-century theories of the mind's relationship to physical actions . . . Kramnick calls attention to 'the largely unacknowledged role of external factors in the period's conception of mind.' He finds textual evidence that philosophers and writers of the period believed human physical actions were c
CHOICE
"Excellent close readings. . . unassuming and understated prose. . . fresh approach. . . Its full contents will be picked over for some time."
Scriblerian
"[L]ucid . . . Actions and Objects is compelling and gracefully written . . . [This is not] a mere study of how writers reflect their contemporaries' theories of mind. Rather, Actions and Objects considers how literature and literary studies alike can put hard problems into practice, test them out, add to their complexities, and refashion them in new and intriguing ways."
