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The belief is widely held that the physical world is causally-driven. The world is one because a tangled web of causally-driven processes keeps it together. However, both the psychological and the social worlds cannot be articulated in causal terms only. Hereby, "motivation" is used as the most general term referring to whatever keeps (synchronically) together and provides (diachronic) reasons explaining the behavior of psychological and social systems. In order to systematically address these problems, a categorical framework is needed for understanding the various types of realities populating the world and their multifarious interrelations. The papers collected in this volume dig into some of the intricacies presented by these problems. The papers here presented have been selected from those presented at the workshops bearing the very same name, "Causality and Motivation" organized in Bolzano and Rome.
List of contents
Foreword
Ch. 1 Roberto Poli, The Structure of Motivation: A First Introduction
Ch. 2 Jean-Michel Roy, The Exclusion Problem and the Hopes for a Motivational Solution
Ch. 3 Liliana Albertazzi, The Subjective Origin of Causality
Ch. 4 Angela Ales Bello, Causality and Motivation in Edith Stein
Ch. 5 Cyprian Love, Christian Doctrine and Theories of Emergence
Ch. 6 David Weissman, Two Kinds of Motivation: Character and Reward
Ch. 7 Riccardo Manzotti, A Process-oriented Casual Framework for Goals and Motivations in Biological and Artificial Agents
Ch. 8 Dale Jacquette, Supervenience (on Steroids) and the Mind
Ch. 9 Christopher Groves, The Futures of Causality: Hans Jonas and Gilles Deleuze
About the author
Roberto Poli (B.A. in sociology, with honors, Ph.D. on ontology for knowledge engineers, Utrecht) is editor-in-chief of Axiomathes (Springer), a peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the study of ontology and cognitive systems, editor of Categories (Ontos), and member of the Academic Board of Directors of the Metanexus Institute, Philadelphia. His research interests include (1) ontology, in both its traditional philosophical understanding and the new, computer-oriented, understanding, (2) the theory of values and the concept of person and (3) anticipatory systems, i.e. system able to take decisions according to their possible future development.
