The term ‘agent’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along several distinct axes, none reducible to the others. In Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology, the agent is the locus where action, attribution, and selfhood converge: the movement ‘from action to the agent’ names a philosophical itinerary in which questions of responsibility, initiative, and narrative identity are progressively unfolded. Ricoeur insists that the agent’s sphere of responsibility is difficult to demarcate precisely because action extends into causal chains that exceed any individual initiative. For the Stoics, as Brad Inwood reconstructs them, the agent is the site where fate and moral responsibility are reconciled through assent — the psychological act that renders an agent’s behaviour genuinely his own even under determinism. In linguistic-cognitive frameworks (Allan on the Greek middle voice), ‘agent’ functions as a grammatical-semantic role, with the prototypical transitive clause presupposing a volitional, animate initiator who acts upon a patient — a structure whose departures reveal much about how cultures encode causality and selfhood. In Nussbaum’s ethical reading of Greek tragedy and philosophy, the agent stands at the intersection of rational choice and tragic constraint, subject to blame, pity, or even praise depending on circumstance. Across these traditions, what unites the inquiry is a shared urgency: to locate within or behind action a responsible, initiating center — and to reckon honestly with the conditions that complicate, fragment, or dissolve that center.
Initiative, we shall say, is an intervention of the agent of action in the course of the world, an intervention which effectively causes changes in the world.
Ricoeur defines the agent’s constitutive function as initiative — a causal intervention in the world that unites practical selfhood with ontological efficacy.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
chapter 9, dealing with choice and the origination of action, offer a thorough review of the problem discussed here from the perspective of the relation between action and the agent.
Ricoeur situates the agent-concept at the juncture of Aristotelian voluntarism and modern action theory, framing it as the culminating problem of practical philosophy.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
the problem is then to delimit the sphere of events for which the agent can be held responsible. This is by no means easy, for several reasons.
Ricoeur argues that determining the agent’s domain of responsibility is inherently complex because action’s effects outrun intentional control and merge with systemic causal chains.
, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis
The psychology of action is an explanatory analysis of the behaviour of an agent, and it is not falsifiable by the agent’s claims about what he did or did not do or feel.
Inwood shows that the Stoic account renders the agent’s self-report philosophically subordinate to a theoretical psychology of assent, grounding responsibility in implicit rather than conscious acts.
, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985thesis
the attribution of the action and its reasons to an agent is never thematized; it too remains unmarked.
Ricoeur identifies a structural lacuna in analytic action theory: the agent as referential anchor of attribution is systematically left implicit and unthematized.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the reconciliation of fate and moral responsibility was the dominant and characteristic problem of Stoic moral philosophy… the isolation of assent in the analysis of action.
Inwood establishes that Stoic engagement with fate drove the conceptual isolation of assent as the defining feature of human agency and moral responsibility.
, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism, 1985supporting
That every agent works for an end clearly follows from the fact that every agent tends to something definite. Now that to which an agent tends definitely must needs be befitting to that agent.
Jung, citing Aquinas via Dionysius, frames the agent teleologically: every agent is constituted by its orientation toward a proper end, a formulation with direct implications for the psychology of purposeful action.
, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951supporting
in some we will pity, or blame in a reduced way; in still other cases, we may even praise the agent for enduring something base and painful in return for great and noble objects gained.
Nussbaum articulates the ethical complexity of agent-evaluation in tragic circumstances, where blame, pity, and even praise become differentiated responses to constrained action.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
the identity of the future slayer of his son Atys — the implicit agent of βληθέντα — is not revealed to Croesus in his dream. In this way, the audience is deliberately kept in suspense by the narrator.
Allan demonstrates how grammatical suppression of the agent in passive constructions serves narrative and pragmatic functions, encoding concealment or indeterminacy of causal origin.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003supporting
the patient is presented as if it were a separate entity. This makes it possible for the patient — in spite of the referential identity with the agent-subject — to be contrasted with a second, external, patient-participant.
Allan shows how the reflexive construction linguistically bifurcates agent and patient roles even when they share a single referent, illuminating the grammatical encoding of self-directed action.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003supporting
we have an agent for which the motor output commands affect not only the living tissues of the body, but also the animate (and inanimate) bodies around the agent in the social environment.
Craig extends the concept of agent from a purely interoceptive locus to an emotional-behavioral system whose outputs constitute meaningful action within a social environment.
, How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self, 2014supporting
the explanation of a runner’s being hit must lie with the runner, not with the thrower.
Williams reconstructs an Antiphontic argument in which causal attribution to an agent turns on the specific contribution each party’s action makes to an outcome, anticipating modern responsibility theory.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993supporting
voice alternations can be fruitfully described as markings of departures from the prototypical transitive event… the grammatical category transitive is structured around a prototype.
Allan establishes that the prototypical transitive event — presupposing a volitional agent acting on a patient — serves as the cognitive baseline from which all voice alternations, including agentless constructions, depart.
, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek A Study of Polysemy, 2003aside
perception and action are perspectivally spatial… a fact that depends precisely on the spatiality of the perceiving and acting body.
Gallagher grounds agency in embodied spatial perspective, arguing that the acting body’s egocentric frame is a necessary condition for the possibility of action.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005aside