Powers and the Identity of Agents

The issue of dispositions and, more particularly, powers is on the cutting edge of contemporary metaphysical debates. Especially recent years have seen a steadily growing interest in the ontological status of powers. There are various arguments stemming from the philosophy of chemistry and biology for the claim that powers are real. In addition, the assumption that there are dispositions, powers, capacities, functions, etc. is also a crucial part of our everyday life. We conceive of ourselves as agents endowed with various potencies and capabilities. Indeed, the conviction that we have powers is an integral part of our worldview. In our project, we aim at examining various fundamental ontological problems concerning the alleged reality of powers, viz. the dispositionalist thesis that dispositions are real, irreducible parts of our world. In particular, we want to investigate the interrelation between dispositionality and the issues of 1) persistence, 2) personal identity, and 3) agent causation. 1) Already in our previous project on "persistence" - sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund - we arrived at the notion of dispositionality as a key concept for the contemporary endurance/perdurance-debate. In our new project we intend to test the thesis that the identity- and continuity-conditions of an individual depend on its essential dispositions and powers, and vice versa. 2) We want to examine the role that dispositionality plays in the various accounts of personal identity based on first person perspective-capacities, such as the capacity for self-reference. We intend to investigate the potential of such accounts for a non-reductive understanding of personal identity and persons in general as proposed by "simple theorists". 3) We want to focus on the question of how our everyday conviction of being causally efficacious agents in the macroscopic realm can be reconciled with dispositional realism with regard to the microscopic realm of the sciences. We intend to argue that the two realms and the corresponding approaches towards dispositions - one proceeding from science, the other from everyday life - are not mutually exclusive, but complementary, and together provide a more complete picture of reality. Agent causality, we shall argue, does not exclude event causality. Although the ontological status of dispositions is heavily debated, the relevance of the issue for and its connection with the mentioned philosophical areas is seldom approached. With the aims of our project, we are thus innovative in various ways. Ultimately, we hope to shed new light on ourselves as responsible agents.

We experience ourselves as active, as beings who can change, cause and bring about numerous things. Thus, the assumption that we are endowed with causal powers, capacities and dispositions seems to be part of our self-conception. Nevertheless, this assumption has been widely rejected in philosophy for a long time. Until recently, theories of causation that did not rely upon causal powers were prevalent. Following Hume, the majority of philosophers argued that causation is nothing but the constant conjunction of events. Hence, dispositionality does not figure among the basic components of reality. Reality, at its core, does not include dispositional entities. This Humean conception of causation was called into question only recently. In view of the results of the natural sciences, many philosophers argued that the assumption of causal powers in nature is indispensable. The constant conjunction of natural processes, they argued, is not a brute fact, but grounded by dispositions and powers. Things behave in a constant way because nature is dispositionally loaded. Dispositionality, hence, is the basis of constant conjunction. It is the metaphysical glue that holds the world together.In our research project, we investigated the presuppositions and implications of these new dispositionalist approaches for our self-conception as agents and our identity as persons. Our goal was to connect the current debate on powers in philosophy of science with our self-experience in everyday life.In particular we argued that human action cannot be explained without reference to causal powers. Persons, we claimed, act by manifesting their capacities. Agents, thus, are not only fields of causes, as is argued in some recent accounts of human agency. As bearers of the dispositions that are essential for acting, persons can neither be reduced nor eliminated. Conversely, the existence conditions of active persons are determined by their causal powers. The question of when a person begins and ends depends upon the dispositional properties this person has. Usually, it is by reference to their rational powers that persons are defined. We believe that this basic idea can be extended to non-personal living beings as well. Their persistence in time also depends on the continued existence of certain powers and capacities. This view on the relation between powers, actions and persons places us in the Aristotelian tradition. In the last few years, neo-Aristotelian approaches to questions concerning causation and agency have steadily increased in popularity. Today, they represent the strongest alternative to Humean accounts of reality. In the Aristotelian tradition, causal processes are not a contingent post hoc. Instead, they can be explained as the interaction of concrete particulars by way of their causal powers. In view of our research, this picture of reality appears to us to be preferable to the Humean position. The Aristotelian approach can be reconciled more easily both with the results of the natural sciences as well as with our everyday understanding of ourselves.