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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.

Table 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