Actions and Their Actors

English Editorial (translated by Silvia Benso)

Abstract

Action is the conceptual core of the historical-social sciences. These sciences have in fact carved their own space of autonomy from the natural sciences on the basis of the distinction between action and movement. This distinction has been and is fundamental in order to ask the major methodological questions that have not ceased to interest those concerned with forms of occurrences that entail or may entail motivations but not mechanical causes.

The contemporary debate on action is driven by the question of agency. This question is explored as “quality of an event that turns the event into an action.” The introduction of the term “agency” in addition to “action” is a way of raising the question whether non-human devices such as machines, computers, robots, and so on may also be capable of acting or, conversely, whether human actions are closer to events than we can initially assume.