Action theorists and formal epistemologists often pursue parallel inquiries regarding rationality, with the former focused on practical rationality, and the latter focused on theoretical rationality. In both fields, there is currently a strong interest in exploring rationality in relation to time. This exploration raises questions about the rationality of certain patterns over time. For example, it raises questions about the rational permissibility of certain patterns of intention; similarly, it raises questions about the rational permissibility of certain patterns of belief. While the action-theoretic and epistemic questions raised are closely related, advances in one field are not always processed by the other. This volume brings together contributions by scholars in action theory and formal epistemology working on questions regarding rationality and time so that researchers in these overlapping fields can profit from each other’s insights. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

A popular model of human action treats it as universally explicable by appeal to what we want. A related view evaluates our actions as rational or otherwise by appeal to what we want. However, these dominant views sit in tension with two other common sense ideas. First, that our normative beliefs — such as our beliefs about what we ought to do — sometimes explain our actions. Second, that those beliefs are crucial for determining whether our actions are rational. To try and resolve these tensions, this book defends 'desire-as-belief', the view that desires are just a special subset of our normative beliefs. This view entitles us to accept orthodox models of human motivation and rationality that explain those things with reference to desire, while also making room for our normative beliefs to play a role in those domains. This view also tells us to diverge from the orthodox view on which desires themselves can never be right or wrong. Rather, according to desire-as-belief, our desires can themselves be assessed for their accuracy, and they are wrong when they misrepresent normative features of the world. Hume says that it is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of your finger, but he is wrong: it is foolish to have this preference, and this is so because this preference misrepresents the relative worth of these things. This book mounts an engaging and comprehensive defence of these ideas.

The first textbook to explain the principles of epistemic game theory.

Brian Hedden defends a radical view about rationality, personal identity, and time. He argues that what it is rational to do should not depend on your past beliefs or actions, which are not part of your current perspective on the world. His impersonal approach holds that what rationality demands of you is solely determined by your evidence.

Rational Belief provides conceptions of belief and knowledge, offers a theory of how they are grounded, and connects them with the will and thereby with action, moral responsibility, and intellectual virtue. A unifying element is a commitment to representing epistemology-which is centrally concerned with belief-as integrated with a plausible philosophy of mind that does justice both to the nature of belief and to the conditions for its formation and regulation. Part One centers on belief and its relation to the will. It explores our control of our beliefs, and it describes several forms belief may take and shows how beliefs are connected with the world outside the mind. Part Two concerns normative aspects of epistemology, explores the nature of intellectual virtue, and presents a theory of moral perception. The book also offers a theory of the grounds of both justification and knowledge and shows how these grounds bear on the self-evident. Rationality is distinguished from justification; each clarified in relation to the other; and the epistemological importance of the phenomenal-for instance, of intuitional experience and other "private" aspects of mental life-is explored. The final section addresses social epistemology. It offers a theory of testimony as essential in human knowledge and a related account of the rational resolution of disagreements.

Rationality and Religious Commitment shows how religious commitment can be rational and describes the place of faith in the postmodern world. It portrays religious commitment as far more than accepting doctrines—it is viewed as a kind of life, not just as an embrace of tenets. Faith is conceived as a unique attitude. It is irreducible to belief but closely connected with both belief and conduct, and intimately related to life's moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions. Part One presents an account of rationality as a status attainable by mature religious people—even those with a strongly scientific habit of mind. Part Two describes what it means to have faith, how faith is connected with attitudes, emotions, and conduct, and how religious experience may support it. Part Three turns to religious commitment and moral obligation and to the relation between religion and politics. It shows how ethics and religion can be mutually supportive even though ethics provides standards of conduct independently of theology. It also depicts the integrated life possible for the religiously committed—a life with rewarding interactions between faith and reason, religion and science, and the aesthetic and the spiritual. The book concludes with two major accounts. One explains how moral wrongs and natural disasters are possible under God conceived as having the knowledge, power, and goodness that make such evils so difficult to understand. The other account explores the nature of persons, human and divine, and yields a conception that can sustain a rational theistic worldview even in the contemporary scientific age.

Human actions unfold over time, in pursuit of ends that are not fully specified in advance. Rational Powers in Action locates these features of the human condition at the heart of a new theory of instrumental rationality. Where many theories of rational agency focus on instantaneous choices between sharply defined outcomes, treating the temporally extended and partially open-ended character of action as an afterthought, this book argues that the deep structure of instrumental rationality can only be understood if we see how it governs the pursuit of long-term, indeterminate ends. These are ends that cannot be realized through a single momentary action, and whose content leaves partly open what counts as realizing the end. Sergio Tenenbaum argues that we need to focus on temporal duration and the indeterminacy of ends in intentional action, even to explain the rational governance of relatively simple actions. Theories of moment-by-moment preference maximization, or indeed any understanding of instrumental rationality on the basis of momentary mental items, cannot capture the fundamental structure of our instrumentally rational capacities. Tenenbaum provides a new theory of instrumental rationality as rationality in action.