Shared Agency and Organized Institutions

Our human lives involve remarkable forms of practical organization: diachronic organization of individual intentional activity; small-scale social organization of shared intentional action; and the organization of complex, organized institutions. A philosophically illuminating theory of human action should help us understand these multiple forms of human practical organization and their inter-relations. This graduate seminar primarily focuses on the role of shared intention and shared agency in organized institutions. The main focus will be a book manuscript on which I am working: Shared and Institutional Agency: Toward a Planning Theory of Human Practical Organization. In this book I seek to extend the foundational role of our capacity for planning agency first to shared agency and then thereby to human organized institutions. To do this I draw on the idea from H.L.A. Hart that our organized institutions are rule-governed, and that to understand this we need a theory of social rules. We will work through this manuscript, together with a wide range of related work by others, including work by H.L.A. Hart, Margaret Gilbert, Scott Shapiro, Philip Pettit, John Searle, Geoffrey Brennan, Cristina Bicchieri, Donald Davidson, and Harry Frankfurt.Enrollment limited to graduate students in Philosophy, others by permission of instructor. 2 unit option available only to Philosophy PhD students beyond the second year.