Mark D. White

Chrisoula Andreou

When we fail to achieve our goals, procrastination is often the culprit. But how exactly is procrastination to be understood? It has been described as imprudent, irrational, inconsistent, and even immoral, but there has been no sustained philosophical debate concerning the topic. This edited volume starts in on the task of integrating the problem of procrastination into philosophical inquiry. The focus is on exploring procrastination in relation to agency, rationality, and ethics-topics that philosophy is well-suited to address. Theoretically and empirically informed analyses are developed and applied with the aim of shedding light on a vexing practical problem that generates a great deal of frustration, regret, and harm. Some of the key questions that are addressed include the following: How can we analyze procrastination in a way that does justice to both its voluntary and its self-defeating dimensions? What kind of practical failing is procrastination? Is it a form of weakness of will? Is it the product of fragmented agency? Is it a vice? Given the nature of procrastination, what are the most promising coping strategies?

Philosophical Essays on Procrastination

The Thief of Time

"This book focuses on the challenges associated with effective choice over time. In particular, it considers the challenges raised by cyclic preferences and by incomplete preferences, both of which interfere with the agent's neatly ordering her options, and which make the agent susceptible to self-defeating patterns of choice in which the agent is drawn into taking each of a series of steps that collectively lead her to a result that she deems unacceptable. The book's guiding questions are the following: What is an agent to do if she finds herself with cyclic preferences or with incomplete preferences? Is an agent or group of agents with such preferences necessarily irrational? It is argued that the answer to the latter question is "no"; rationality does not invariably prohibit disorderly preferences, but it does (to get back to the first question) prompt us to proceed with caution and with a readiness to show restraint, based on an awareness of larger dynamics, when our preferences are disorderly. Theories of rational choice often dismiss or abstract away from the sorts of disorderly preferences at issue here. They assume that rational agents can and should have neat preferences over their options; but this assumption is problematic. Rationality can validate certain disorderly preference structures while also protecting us from self-defeating patterns of choice. Rationality can thus handle quite a lot of messiness, which is important, since rationality wouldn't be all that helpful if, whenever messiness threatened, we could not turn to it for guidance"--

Chrisoula Andreou

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