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+ Zachary C. Irving (Under Review) "The Spontaneity Deficit"

Digital distractions are omnipresent. Notifications, emails, Twitter posts, YouTube recommendations, Google Ads: such technologies are designed to place historically unprecedented demands on attention. Whether these changes are for good or ill depends on two philosophical questions. One is descriptive: what kinds of mental activities do digital distractions generate? Another is normative: what kinds of mental activities contribute to a good life? Many argue that digital distractions are a problem because they undermine our capacity to pay attention. Yet digital technologies not only make us more distracted; they also change how we are distracted. Our minds used to wander during idly times like riding a bus or walking. Digital distractions instead leave us “stuck” on salient topics, such as moral outrage or doom-scrolling. This is a problem because spontaneous forms of attention like mind-wandering help us explore alternative points of view. Philosophical reflection on the mental good life bears not only on how we characterize the problem of digital distraction but also how we solve it. Current solutions often target the problem of inattention and thus offer strategies to make us more focused, productive, or deeper workers. These solutions may heighten attention. But they likely worsen the spontaneity deficit, leaving us even less time to wander.

+ Zachary C. Irving (Under Review) "Guidance Without Ends"

Action theorists widely hold that guidance separates action from mere behaviour. Yet we haven't appreciated that there are two basic kinds of action guidance and therefore two basic kinds of action. Guidance mechanisms impose completion conditions on actions like running a race or searching for your keys. Such actions are therefore telic: they are guided towards an endpoint and are then complete. In contrast, guidance mechanisms set no completion conditions for actions like running around or looking at a mountain vista. Such actions are therefore atelic: they unfold for some arbitrary time, until the agent is interrupted or moves on. My paper develops a novel theory of the distinction between telic and atelic action guidance. I then show how this distinction has implications for core topics in action theory including the normativity, satisfaction conditions, experiential character, and quantification of actions.

+ Aaron Glasser and Zachary C. Irving (Under Review) "Affect in Action"

Obsessive thinking is a problem case for the philosophy of mental action, insofar as it both (1) feels passive but (2) manifests our agency. Our solution to this “Puzzle of Obsessive Action” rests on a fundamental distinction between what we call “occurrent” and “aggregative” agency. Occurrent agency reflects the agent’s capacity to guide her current behavior and thoughts as they unfold over time. We argue that obsessive thinking is a form of occurrent mental agency, since the agent’s attention is guided at the personal level, endorsed, and resistible. Our paper’s first contribution is therefore to argue for the heterodox views that obsessive thinking is active and, therefore, that action can be grounded in affect. Why, then, do obsessive thoughts feel passive? We argue that this is because they undermine aggregative agency. Aggregative agency reflects the agent’s capacity to organize and distribute her actions over time. Although each episode of obsessive thinking is guided, the sheer frequency of those episodes undermines the agent's ability to organize her mental actions. Obsessive thinking is therefore occurrently active but aggregatively passive. Our paper’s second contribution is therefore to use obsessive thinking as a wedge to pry these forms of agency apart.