Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson

Book excerpt: 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? Actions and Objects examines the literature and philosophy of action during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when philosophers, novelists, poets, and scientists were all concerned with the place of the mind in the world. They wondered 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. The book emphasizes writers who tried to make actions compatible with external determination and to blur the boundary between mind and matter. This kind of externalism has often been overlooked in the effort to make psychological depth and interiority arise in the eighteenth century. Kramnick follows a long tradition of examining the close relation between literary and philosophical writing, but he fundamentally revises the terrain, situating literature alongside philosophy as jointly interested in discovering how minds work.