Akin to Aristotle’s attempt in the Poetics to lay out the various conditions of artistically rendered human action that make for the most gripping treatments, Hegel develops a poetics of action that attempts to articulate what makes for the most beautiful artistic presentations of action. This chapter focuses on this “poetics of action,” and it is argued that the key to understanding Hegel’s aesthetic privileging of heroic action in his poetics lies in the peculiar ontology of the artwork itself: that is, it is argued that the decisive, transformative events that are the focus of scenes of heroic action in effect provide art with that express content that most readily fits with the artwork’s own deeper nature as such a transformative event in its own right. The chapter explores various of Hegel’s specific aesthetic judgments about dramatic settings, characters, narrative structure, and the role of ethics in art, in each case arguing that the basis of these judgments is oriented both in terms of the heroic and in terms of what enables the character of a transformative event to become most manifest.

This chapter treats the aesthetics of human action. It begins by taking up athletic contest in particular, for insofar as the performance of athletic action serves to make conspicuous how an otherwise given, natural body becomes the vehicle for a striking realization of spirit’s freedom and autonomy, its eventful unfolding can serve as a kind of aesthetic standard for assessing the other forms of action as well. However, most of our actions prove to be rather lackluster in comparison, and when Hegel turns to the aesthetic prospects of practical life in the context of modern civil society and the state, he finds only what is prosaic, action here being defined on all sides by contingency, dependence, and exposure to external forces. Hegel would have us see that the aesthetic limitations of practical life are rooted in inherent, ontological limitations of practical life itself – what this chapter calls the tragedy of the practical – implying that there is no question of seeking a higher form of practical life that would be free of such limitation. This limitation is surpassed only by redefining ourselves, not exclusively in practical terms but in the terms of “absolute spirit,” whose first form is art.

This chapter and Chapter 9 offer a detailed reading of central arguments in The Human Condition. A striking fact about this study of the “active life” is the absence of any discussion of morality, apart from minimum obligations to keep promises and forgive unintended consequences of action. The chapter sets out the problem, and then offers a conjecture about what moved Arendt to neglect morality: her fear that moral constraints would handcuff human action, which in her view makes life meaningful. The following chapter analyzes that conjecture in depth. The remainder of this chapter sets the stage by examining central themes and vocabulary in The Human Condition. It explains what Arendt means by “human condition”, unpacks her concepts of labor, work, and action and the risks of confusing them, and explains why the human condition of natality (“unto us a child is born”) matters so crucially.

An animating question in The Human Condition is what makes life meaningful and defeats futility. This chapter reconstructs Arendt’s answer. It explains why she finds the life of contemplation unsatisfactory and why the life of labor and consumption can’t be satisfying on their own terms. Neither can the life devoted to making. The artisan “could be redeemed from his predicament of meaninglessness only through the interrelated faculties of action and speech.” The chapter analyzes Arendt’s concept of action, and then returns to the Case of the Missing Morality. It argues that the very thing that makes action meaningful – that it matters to our peers – means that their moral judgments are defining characteristics of action. Her occasional assertions that action is inherently amoral are therefore a mistake. Her moral judgments about Eichmann caused her to recognize this and turned her to issues of moral judgment and legal accountability.

Leadership on climate action is about demonstrating change in reality, not about having a senior position or being ‘in charge’. We are all involved in leadership. At work, at school, in retirement or in our leisure activities, we can demonstrate leadership by questioning default decisions and demonstrating our enthusiasm for alternatives compatible with zero emissions. Leadership could involve the four actions of Chapter 9, or speaking out among our work and community groups, or writing letters, or asking difficult questions at school. We can all show leadership, like that demonstrated by the two women who created the ‘flight-free’ movement in Sweden, and our leadership is urgently needed.

Olympiodorus provided his students in Alexandria in the sixth century with a handy summary of political science which I discuss and develop in Chapter 14. The following themes are introduced: the domain of political science (the realm of praxis, the life of soul in the material world, in the state or city, where political science directs other subordinate expertises); law (the primacy of law in an ideal city for humans); practical wisdom (its use of theoretical wisdom and difference from it); the goal (‘political’ happiness, involving the political virtues and preparing for a higher life); earthly and heavenly cities; the place of the philosopher in the city; Platonist texts concerning political science.

Chapter 6 gives a survey of ethical themes in Plotinus. It begins with happiness (eudaimonia) as life at its highest degree, the life of intellect of which human soul is capable. The affairs of bodily existence have no part in this life of intellect, which is a perfect, joyful, peaceful state. To reach this state, virtue is required. Two sorts of virtue are distinguished: the ‘political’ virtues and the ‘higher’ (or ‘greater’) virtues, as stages in assimilation to the divine life of transcendent Intellect. The affairs of our bodily life concern us as souls which have a need, a natural ‘appropriation’, to take care of bodily lives, ours and that of others. Action in this bodily existence should be guided by practical wisdom, a wisdom guided by ‘premises’, i.e., norms derived from theoretical wisdom. Finally, I indicate the variety of texts composed by Plotinus’ Platonist successors where ethical themes may be found.

This chapter consists of two parts. The brief first part provides an overview of some of the main issues connected with sin that were discussed by early scholastic theologians. The second part focuses on the problem of the source of evil actions: are they 'from God' or 'from humans or the devil'?

This chapter is solely dedicated to reinforcement learning (RL), one of the three main learning paradigms covered in the book (together with regression and classification). The goal of RL is for an agent to learn from and respond to its environment modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP), by following a set of policies to take the best action at each state of the MDP, in order to receive the maximum total accumulated reward. The utmost goal is to come up with the optimal policy in terms of the best action to take at each state. Different from all optimization problems previously considered for maximizing (or minimizing) certain objective functions, RL achieves its goal by the general method of dynamic programming (while linear and quadratic programmings are for constrained optimization), which solves a complex problem by breaking it up and solving a set of subproblems recursively. Specifically, the main method for RL is the Q-learning algorithm which finds the optimal policy that takes the best action selected based on the expected values of the total reward at all states and all actions at each state. Toward to end of the chapter, various more advanced versions of RL are briefly discussed based on some previously learned methods such as neural networks and deep learning.

According to Suárez, each of Aristotle’s four causes counts as a cause because it inflows being to another, and each has a proper influx. Several scholars regard Suárez’s account of the influx of the final cause as unsatisfactory. These interpreters overlook his identification of the influx of a cause with its causality, and his view that the causality of a cause is an entity, a res or a mode. I argue that, on Suárez’s view, the influx or causality of the final cause is a component of the mode of action, and that this account satisfies the demands of his influx theory of cause. I also uncover some unfamiliar elements of Suárez’s view of final causality: that it is simultaneous with efficient causality and that, wherever an end is a real cause of some effect, its causality is an intrinsic feature of the action by which that effect is produced.

Reflection is an action in which we step back and take another look. It is not a new concept in the health sciences. Contemporary conceptions of reflective practice are underpinned by the classic works of John Dewey, Carl Rogers and Donald Schön. Nowadays, reflection is considered one of the core components of healthcare education and is evident in the governing codes and guidelines underpinning professional practice in many health disciplines in Australasia. References to reflection appear in the health disciplines’ code of professional practice or code of conduct. Effective and purposeful reflection is seen to be a core component of proficiency and continuing professional development. Despite this, students, practitioners and healthcare leaders often find reflection – and critical reflective practice – challenging.

Chapter 1.2 focuses on cardiac physiology, from the cardiac action potential to pacemaker cell physiology. We cover the anatomy of the arterial and venous coronary circulation with numerous clinically relevant applications. These topics are frequently examined and the chapter includes diagrams that can be expected to be understood.

In conclusion, Mike acknowledges the enormity of the challenges ahead and the potential struggles the future holds. He also shares what gives him hope and that effective action on climate and other key issues could be just around the corner. The chapter finishes with a checklist of what the reader can do on an individual level, in many areas of their lives, to be part of the change that is so urgently needed.

Mirror neurons fire while both performing and observing an action and enable us to understand and predict what others are doing. This function arises because a) the visual-motor matching of mirror neurons are a consequence of stimulus-response mapping mechanisms that transform sensory input of observing someone else’s action into a matching motor response, or b) we understand what we have done ourselves and what others are doing simply because action and action observation are coded in the same representational format, and mirror neurons are an instantiation of such common coding.

Perception and action are continuously running cycles of sensing and perceiving, predicting, acting, and adjusting. Sensation and perception are assumed to be intrinsically functional and forward-looking in the service of action. This is because relevant information from the environment is needed to guide our actions.

This chapter of the handbook introduces some core elements of moral decision making by framing it from one particular perspective: expected utility theory. In its classic form, expected utility theory focuses on the outcomes of actions: the expected utility of a decision is the sum of the values associated with the different possible outcomes of the decision weighted by the probability of their occurrence. As such, expected utility theory is well suited to explain the moral choices recommended by utilitarianism, which characterizes right actions in terms of the maximization of aggregate utility. As the authors point out, however, expected utility theory can be also used to model nonutilitarian decision making by assigning utilities to actions themselves, not just their outcomes. This action-based form of expected utility theory can readily accommodate the fact that people tend to assign low utility to actions that violate moral norms. Further, action-based expected utility theory can explain a wide range of phenomena revealed by empirical research on moral decision making, such as interpersonal disagreement about fairness, in-group bias, and outcome neglect.

This paper presents the main topics, arguments, and positions in the philosophy of AI at present (excluding ethics). Apart from the basic concepts of intelligence and computation, the main topics of artificial cognition are perception, action, meaning, rational choice, free will, consciousness, and normativity. Through a better understanding of these topics, the philosophy of AI contributes to our understanding of the nature, prospects, and value of AI. Furthermore, these topics can be understood more deeply through the discussion of AI; so we suggest that “AI philosophy” provides a new method for philosophy.