Understanding Agency

Understanding Agency PDF Author: Liz Jeffery
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1847423302
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Using student-friendly features such as case studies and a glossary, this textbook provides a straightforward introduction to the concept of agency and how it can usefully inform the practice of social welfare.

Understanding Agency

Understanding Agency PDF Author: Liz Jeffery
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1847423302
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Using student-friendly features such as case studies and a glossary, this textbook provides a straightforward introduction to the concept of agency and how it can usefully inform the practice of social welfare.

Understanding Agency

Understanding Agency PDF Author: Barry Barnes
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761963684
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
In this penetrating and assured book, one of the leading commentators in the field argues that social theory is moving in the wrong direction in its reflections on human freedom and autonomy. It has borrowed notions of 'agency' and 'choice' from everyday discourse, but increasingly it puts a misconceived individualistic gloss upon them. Against this, Barnes unequivocally identifies human beings as social agents in a profound sense, and emphasises the vital importance of their sociability. Notions of 'agency', 'freedom' and 'choice' have to be understood by reference to their role in communicative interaction; they are key components of the discourse through which human beings identify each other, and have effects upon each other, as soci

Understanding Human Agency

Understanding Human Agency PDF Author: Erasmus Mayr
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191619264
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Our self-understanding as human agents includes a commitment to three crucial claims about human agency: that agents must be active, that actions are part of the natural order of the universe, and that intentional actions can be explained by the agent's reasons for acting. While all of these claims are indispensable elements of our view of ourselves as human agents, they are in continuous conflict and tension with one another, especially once one adopts the currently predominant view of what the natural order must be like. One of the central tasks of philosophy of action consists in showing how, despite appearances, these conflicts can be resolved and our self-understanding as agents be vindicated. The mainstream of contemporary philosophy of action holds that this task can only be fulfilled by an event-causal reductive view of human agency, paradigmatically embodied in the so-called 'standard model' developed by Donald Davidson. Erasmus Mayr, in contrast, develops a new agent-causal solution to these conflicts and shows why this solution is superior both to event-causalist accounts and to Von Wright's intentionalism about agency. He offers a comprehensive theory of substance-causation on the basis of a realist conception of powers, which allows one to see how the widespread rejection of agent-causation rests on an unfounded 'Humean' view of nature and of causal processes. At the same time, Mayr addresses the question of the nature of reasons for acting and complements its substance-causal account of activity with a non-causal account of acting for reasons in terms of following a standard of success.

Persons: Understanding Psychological Selfhood and Agency

Persons: Understanding Psychological Selfhood and Agency PDF Author: Jack Martin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1441910654
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
At its core, psychology is about persons: their thinking, their problems, the improvement of their lives. The understanding of persons is crucial to the discipline. But according to this provocative new book, between current essentialist theories that rely on biological models, and constructionist approaches based on sociocultural experience, the concept of the person has all but vanished from psychology. Persons: Understanding Psychological Selfhood and Agency recasts theories of mind, behavior, and self, synthesizing a range of psychologists and philosophers to restore the centrality of personhood—especially the ability to make choices and decisions—to the discipline. The authors’ unique perspective de-emphasizes method and formula in favor of moral agency and life experience, reveals frequently overlooked contributions of psychology to the study of individuals and groups, and traces traditions of selfhood and personhood theory, including: The pre-psychological history of personhood, a developmental theory of situated, agentive personhood, the political disposition of self as a kind of understanding, Human agency as a condition of personhood, Emergentist theories in psychology, the development of the perspectival self. Persons represents an intriguing new path in the study of the human condition in our globalizing world. Researchers in developmental, social, and clinical psychology as well as social science philosophers will find in these pages profound implications not only for psychology but also for education, politics, and ethics.

Understanding Human Agency

Understanding Human Agency PDF Author: Erasmus Mayr
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199606218
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
How can we be active agents when processes in the world are explicable by the laws of natural science? Erasmus Mayr explores this deep-running tension in our self-understanding and develops a new agent-causal solution to the conflict. He argues that actions explained by aims and reasons are compatible with a scientific view of the universe.

Understand Social Agency

Understand Social Agency PDF Author: Armand Lauffer
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780803923492
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
This revised and expanded Second Edition of the widely read Understanding Your Social Agency offers students and practitioners a simple yet comprehensive introduction to organizational theory and its meaning for social agencies. Each of the first ten chapters is devoted to a particular perspective for understanding the agency. The final chapter considers using each of the ten perspectives independently, or in tandem, to solve problems within or on behalf of the agency. It will be a useful guide to solving problems of an organizational nature within an agency.

Understanding Feminism

Understanding Feminism PDF Author: Peta Bowden
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317492315
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
"Understanding Feminism" provides an accessible guide to one of the most important and contested movements in progressive modern thought. Presenting feminism as a dynamic, multi-faceted and adaptive movement that has evolved in response to the changing practical and theoretical problems faced by women, the authors take a problem-oriented approach that maps the complex strands of feminist thinking in relation to women's struggles for equal recognition and rights, and freedom from oppressive constraints of sex, self-expression and autonomy. Each chapter focuses on a different cluster of concerns, demonstrating key moves in second-wave feminist thought, as well as some of the diversity in response-strategies that encompass both socio-economic and cultural-symbolic concerns. This approach not only shows how central feminist insights, theories and strategies emerge and re-emerge across different contexts, but makes clear that far from being 'over', feminism remains a vital response to the diverse issues that women (and men) find pressing and socially important.

Scientific Explanation, Causality, and Agency

Scientific Explanation, Causality, and Agency PDF Author: Majid D. Beni
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040093159
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
This book draws on advances in computational neuroscience and theoretical biology to provide a clear and accessible agentive account of the nature of causality and scientific explanations. Instead of attempting to establish the elements of scientific explanation, such as causality, in a reality unadulterated by a human perspective, this book relies on scientific facts about cognition to describe the structure of agency from a distinctly human perspective. The book draws on the Free Energy Principle to reinforce the agency theory of causality and extend it to an account of explanation as well. This principle not only provides a theoretical account of how self-organising systems engage with the causal structure of the environment, but it also offers a viable notion of agency and is compatible with the projectivist aspects of the agency theory. Scientific Explanation, Causality, and Agency will appeal to researchers and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of cognitive science, epistemology, computational neuroscience, and theoretical biology.

Empathy And Agency

Empathy And Agency PDF Author: Hans Herbert Kogler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429980469
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
A crucial debate currently raging in the fields of cognitive and social science centers around general and specific approaches to understanding the actions of others. When we understand the actions of another person, do we do so on the basis of a general theory of psychology, or on the basis of an effort to place ourselves in the particular position of that specific person? Hans Herbert Kögler and Karsten R. Stueber's Empathy and Agency addresses this other issues vital to current social science in an advanced and diverse analysis of the foundations of social-scientific methodology based on recent cognitive psychology. The book serves as both an introduction to the debate for non-academic audiences and as a catalyst for further discussion for serious theorists. Empathy and Agency provides a solid foundation of the fundamental issues in social and cognitive science, but also presents the most influential paradigms in the field at this time.

Inviting Understanding

Inviting Understanding PDF Author: Sonja K. Foss
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538131048
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Inviting Understanding: A Portrait of Invitational Rhetoric is an authoritative reference work designed to provide a comprehensive overview of the theory of invitational rhetoric, developed twenty-five years ago by Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin. This theory challenges the conventional conception of rhetoric as persuasion and defines rhetoric as an invitation to understanding as a means to create a relationship rooted in equality, immanent value, and self-determination. Rather than celebrating argumentation, division, and winning, invitational rhetoric encourages rhetors to listen across differences, to engage in dialogue, and to try to understand positions different from their own. Organized into the three categories of foundations, extensions, and applications, Inviting Understanding is a compilation of published articles and new essays that explore and expand the theory. The book provides readers with access to a wide range of resources about this revolutionary theory in areas such as community organizing, social justice activism, social media, film, graffiti, institutional and team decision-making, communication and composition pedagogy, and interview protocols.