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, or believing
something to be true cause a person to make a promise? In Actions and
Objects, Jonathan Kramnick examines the literature and philosophy of
action during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when
philosophers and novelists, poets and scientists were all concerned with
the place of the mind in the world. These writers asked 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.
Kramnick puts particular emphasis on those who tried to make actions
compatible with external determination and to blur the boundary between
mind and matter. He follows a long tradition of examining the close
relation between literary and philosophical writing during the period,
but fundamentally revises the terrain. Rather than emphasizing
psychological depth and interiority or asking how literary works were
understood as true or fictional, he situates literature alongside
philosophy as jointly interested in discovering how minds work.