What sets intentional actions apart from the rest has long been a central question in the philosophy of action. In this book, Markos Valaris offers a novel answer, grounded in a distinctive 'knowledge-first' conception of agential control. Rejecting decompositional accounts that analyse intentional action into separate mental and bodily components, Valaris argues that control is best understood as a capacity for knowledge of a distinctively practical kind. This framework yields a unified account of intentional action and illuminates several live debates in the field, including the ontology of actions as events, the epistemology of intentional action, and the nature of skill.

‘Valaris reorients the philosophy of action, focusing not on mental processes prior to action but on execution-agential control-itself. Drawing on 'knowledge first' epistemology and Anscombe's philosophy of action, he argues that agential control is a capacity to know what one is doing, and presents a novel ontology of actions as hylomorphically-structured occurrent particulars that unfold over time. This is an important book-required reading for epistemologists and philosophers of mind and action.'

Will Small - University of Illinois Chicago