Minimal Cooperation and Shared Agency

This volume examines minimality in cooperation and shared agency from various angles. It features essays written by top scholars in the philosophy of mind and action. Taken together, the essays provide a genuine contribution to the contemporary joint action debate.

The main accounts in this debate present sufficient rather than necessary or minimal criteria for there to be cooperation. Much discussion in the debate deals with robust rather than more attenuate and simple cases of cooperation or shared agency. Focusing on such minimal cases, however, may help to explain how cooperation comes into existence and how minimal cooperation interrelates with more complex cases of cooperation.

The contributors discuss minimality in cooperation by focusing on particular aspects. For example, they consider how social roles might deliver minimal cooperation constraints or what the minimal contextual criteria are for cooperation to emerge.

Readers will find the answers to these and other questions: What is minimally cooperative behavior? By what steps could full members of a society organized by conventions, norms and institutions be constructed from creatures with minimal social skills and cognitive abilities? What do we experience of actions when we act together with a purpose?

Anika Fiebich has finished her Ph.D. in philosophy on ＂Varieties of Social Understanding＂ in 2013 at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Albert Newen (Bochum) and Prof. Shaun Gallagher (Memphis). Her research focuses on various issues in the philosophy of mind and action. During her Ph.D. and postdoc time, she has worked at the Ruhr-University Bochum, École Normale Superièure in Lyon, Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, University of Memphis, University of Wollongong, Duisburg-Essen University, and the Center for the Study of Social Action at the University of Milan.