How do minds cause events in the world? How does wanting to write a letter cause a person's hands to move across the page? Actions and Objects examines the literature and philosophy of
action during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when philosophers, novelists, poets, and scientists were all concerned with the place of the mind in the world. They
wondered whether belief, desire, and emotion were part of natureand thus subject to laws of cause and effector in a special place outside the natural order. The book emphasizes writers who
tried to make actions compatible with external determination and to blur the boundary between mind and matter. This kind of externalism has often been overlooked in the effort to make
psychological depth and interiority arise in the eighteenth century. Kramnick follows a long tradition of examining the close relation between literary and philosophical writing, but he
fundamentally revises the terrain, situating literature alongside philosophy as jointly interested in discovering how minds work.
