Planners, Deciders, Performers. Aristotelian Reflections on the Ontology of Agents and Actions

Aristotle did not write a book about action theory, nor on the ontology of agents. But he does touch upon the topic of actions in many of his works: in his works on ethics, in his work On the soul, in the biological part of his work, where he discusses the movements of animals, and also in the Physics, where he is concerned with change in general. However, opinion is divided as to how these somewhat scattered remarks are to be evaluated. Some, like John Ackrill (in Ackrill 1978), think that Aristotle tampered around with his remarks on action and that his account is seriously inconsistent. Others, like David Charles, think there is such a thing like a consistent theory of action in Aristotle, and indeed Charles wrote a voluminous book to reconstruct this theory (Charles 1984).