ABSTRACT
My goal in this paper is to present and assess Husserl’s account of action in the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins . I argue that Husserl’s phenomenological description strikes a unique balance between an anti-naturalistic construal of action as non-reducible to natural causality, and a broadly naturalistic refusal to assign to actions a non-natural cause like ‘the will.’ After discussing Husserl’s definition of actions, I present Husserl’s anatomy of an action, which can be simple or composite and, accordingly, break down into a primary and a secondary component. In the third part I turn to consider the living body as the source of actions, and I offer a description of the subtle interplay of passivity and activity for the constitution of deliberate, goal-oriented actions. I conclude with some remarks about the philosophical lesson that we can learn about the problem of free will from these analyses.
