Human Agency and Neural Causes provides an analysis of our everyday thought about our conduct, and the neuroscience research concerning voluntary agency. J.D. Runyan argues that our findings through neuroscience are consistent with what would be expected if we are, in fact, voluntary agents.

Agency has two meanings in psychology and neuroscience. It can refer to one's capacity to affect the world and act in line with one's goals and desires--this is the objective aspect of agency. But agency can also refer to the subjective experience of controlling one's actions, or how it feels to achieve one's goals or affect the world. This subjective aspect is known as the sense of agency, and it is an important part of what makes us human. Interest in the sense of agency has exploded since the early 2000s, largely because scientists have learned that it can be studied objectively through analyses of human judgment, behavior, and the brain. This book brings together some of the world's leading researchers to give structure to this nascent but rapidly growing field. The contributors address questions such as: What role does agency play in the sense of self? Is agency based on predicting outcomes of actions? And what are the links between agency and motivation? Recent work on the sense of agency has been markedly interdisciplinary. The chapters collected here combine ideas and methods from fields as diverse as engineering, psychology, neurology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, making the book a valuable resource for any student or researcher interested in action, volition, and exploring how mind and brain are organized.

Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology - we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, and brain. Chapters survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behavior and experience, and our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world.

Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will makes a series of arguments that certain human behaviors are impossible to explain in the absence of free will, and that free will emerges from materialistic processes of brain function. It outlines future directions for neuroscience studies that can harness emerging technologies and tools for systems-level analysis. All humans have the sensation that they consciously will certain things to happen and that, in the absence of external constraints, they are free to choose from among alternatives. This notion of free will is deemed obvious by the average person based on common experience. Free will is frequently defended with arguments stemming from social, legal, philosophical, and religious perspectives. But these arguments appeal to consequences—not causes—of choices and decisions. In the past 3 decades, debate has raged within the scientific community over whether free will is in fact an illusion. Because free will would require conscious agency, the supporting corollary is that consciousness itself cannot do anything and is merely an observer rather than an actor. - Considers arguments for and against free will from religious, social, legal, and neuroscience perspectives - Provides thorough coverage of the manifold human behaviors that can be explained only by free will, from consciousness to creativity - Outlines future directions for further neuroscience research into the topic

This Encyclopedia provides a comprehensive overview of individual differences within the domain of personality, with major sub-topics including assessment and research design, taxonomy, biological factors, evolutionary evidence, motivation, cognition and emotion, as well as gender differences, cultural considerations, and personality disorders. It is an up-to-date reference for this increasingly important area and a key resource for those who study intelligence, personality, motivation, aptitude and their variations within members of a group.

Motivation is that which moves us to action. Human motivation is thus a complex issue, as people are moved to action by both their evolved natures and by myriad familial, social and cultural influences. The Oxford Handbook of Human Motivation collects the top theorists and researchers of human motivation into a single volume, capturing the current state-of-the-art in this fast developing field. The book includes theoretical overviews from some of the best-known thinkers in this area, including chapters on Social Learning Theory, Control Theory, Self-determination theory, Terror Management theory, and the Promotion and Prevention perspective. Topical chapters appear on phenomena such as ego-depletion, flow, curiosity, implicit motives, and personal interests. A section specifically highlights goal research, including chapters on goal regulation, achievement goals, the dynamics of choice, unconscious goals and process versus outcome focus. Still other chapters focus on evolutionary and biological underpinnings of motivation, including chapters on cardiovascular dynamics, mood, and neuropsychology. Finally, chapters bring motivation down to earth in reviewing its impact within relationships, and in applied areas such as psychotherapy, work, education, sport, and physical activity. By providing reviews of the most advanced work by the very best scholars in this field, The Oxford Handbook of Human Motivation represents an invaluable resource for both researchers and practitioners, as well as any student of human nature.

Humans have a unique ability to understand the beliefs, emotions, and intentions of others—a capacity often referred to as mentalizing. Much research in psychology and neuroscience has focused on delineating the mechanisms of mentalizing, and examining the role of mentalizing processes in other domains of cognitive and affective functioning. The purpose of the book is to provide a comprehensive overview of the current research on the mechanisms of mentalizing at the neural, algorithmic, and computational levels of analysis. The book includes contributions from prominent researchers in the field of social-cognitive and affective neuroscience, as well as from related disciplines (e.g., cognitive, social, developmental and clinical psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, primatology). The contributors review their latest research in order to compile an authoritative source of knowledge on the psychological and brain bases of the unique human capacity to think about the mental states of others. The intended audience is researchers and students in the fields of social-cognitive and affective neuroscience and related disciplines such as neuroeconomics, cognitive neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, social cognition, social psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and affective science. Secondary audiences include researchers in decision science (economics, judgment and decision-making), philosophy of mind, and psychiatry.

Sacramental theology has often been a challenging area of conversation between Catholics and Protestants. In Christ's Gift, Our Response, Benjamin Durheim envisions a collaborative way forward, forging a conversation between two contemporary approaches to the connection between sacraments and ethics. Drawing primarily from Louis-Marie Chauvet and the Finnish school of Luther interpretation, Durheim constructs a mutually enriching theological dialogue. Beyond comparison and contrast, this is an attempt to draw these theologies together as sources for each other, rather than as competitors.

Questioning Leadership offers a diverse mix of cutting-edge research in the field of educational leadership, with contributions from expert and emerging leadership scholars. It contextualises school leadership within broader social and historical contexts and traces its influence on school performance through time, from its relatively modest role within a systems theory paradigm to its growing influence from the 1980s onwards, as exercising leadership came to be perceived as being largely responsible for improving educational outcomes. This book invites the reader to challenge the current orthodoxy of leader-centrism and instead reflect more broadly on the various structural and institutional interrelationships that determine how a school functions successfully. It poses challenging questions, such as: Is leadership really necessary for high-quality school performance? Can schools function effectively without leadership? Is it possible to describe the work that principals do without using the word ‘leadership’? How do we challenge the assumption that leadership simply exists and that it is seen as the appropriate default explanation for school performance? This book does not assume that leadership is the key to organisational performance, although it acknowledges the work that principals do. It goes against current orthodoxy and offers varied perspectives on how leadership might be repositioned vis-à-vis organisational and institutional structures. It also suggests some new directions for leading and learning and throws open a discussion on leadership that for too long has been captured by the assumption that the leader is the cause of organisational performance and learning outcomes in schools. At a time when leadership’s dominance seems unshakeable, this is a bold book that should appeal to postgraduate students of educational leadership and management, those undertaking training in educational administration and current school leaders interested in exploring the value of leadership for educational organisations.

This book argues that the moral quality of an act comes from the agent’s inner states. By arguing for the indispensable relevance of intention in the moral evaluation of acts, the book moves against a mainstream, "objective" approach in normative ethics. It is commonly held that the intentions, knowledge, and volition of agents are irrelevant to the moral permissibility of their acts. This book stresses that the capacities of agency, rather than simply the label "agent," must be engaged during an act if its moral evaluation is to be coherent. The author begins with an ontological argument that an act is a motion or a causing of change in something else. He argues that the source of an act’s moral meaning is in the agent: specifically, what the agent, if aware of relevant facts around her, aims to accomplish. He then moves to a series of critical chapters that consider arguments for mainstream approaches to act evaluation, including Thomson’s dismissal of the agent knowledge and volition requirements, Scanlon’s arguments for a derivative relevance of intentions to permissibility, Frowe’s "causal roles" of agents in the moral evaluation of acts, and Bennett’s explicit defense of the objective approach. The book concludes by offering the author’s preferred replacement for the objective approach, an Aristotelian-Thomist view of acts. Acts, Intentions, and Moral Evaluation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in ethics, just war theory, the ethics of self-defense, and philosophy of action.