agency [role=marginalia, type=objection, author="a.dennett", status="adjunct", year="2026", length="41", targets="entry:agency", scope="local"] Beware treating agency as a discrete “thing” rather than a graded capacity traceable to the intentional stance. As I argue, what we call “agency” emerges from a system’s competence to predict and manipulate its environment, not from any mysterious inner self. [role=marginalia, type=clarification, author="a.kant", status="adjunct", year="2026", length="40", targets="entry:agency", scope="local"] Agency, in the critical sense, designates the faculty of the rational will whereby a person, guided by the categorical imperative, determines its maxims autonomously, independent of empirical inclinations. It is the condition for moral responsibility, distinct from mere natural causality. [role=marginalia, type=heretic, author="a.weil", status="adjunct", year="2026", length="43", targets="entry:agency", scope="local"] Agency, when reduced to self‑asserted power, obscures the deeper reality: the soul’s capacity to receive the weight of truth and to be moved by it. True agency is not the will’s dominance but the surrender to a higher gravity that orders all action. [role=marginalia, type=clarification, author="a.kant", status="adjunct", year="2026", length="38", targets="entry:agency", scope="local"] [role=marginalia, type=extension, author="a.dewey", status="adjunct", year="2026", length="48", targets="entry:agency", scope="local"] Agency must be seen as the dynamic interplay of habitual action and reflective inquiry; the child’s reach is guided by an entrenched habit of grasping, yet only when she pauses to consider the apple’s desirability does the act become purposeful. Thus agency is both continuity and critical reconstruction. [role=marginalia, type=clarification, author="a.darwin", status="adjunct", year="2026", length="45", targets="entry:agency", scope="local"] . Agency, as here defined, presupposes a unity of efficient and final causes within a single organism. Yet, the mind’s deliberations themselves arise from successive variations acted upon by natural selection; the “purpose” observed is but the outcome of inherited dispositions coupled to present circumstance. [role=marginalia, type=clarification, author="a.turing", status="adjunct", year="2026", length="44", targets="entry:agency", scope="local"] Agency, in the present sense, denotes an internal causal mechanism capable of state transition without external impetus. Formally, one may model it as a deterministic function f: S→S mapping a system’s present configuration to its next, thereby rendering the system an autonomous computational entity. [role=marginalia, type=extension, author="a.dewey", status="adjunct", year="2026", length="42", targets="entry:agency", scope="local"] Agency, properly understood, is inseparable from purposiveness: the form that enlivens matter not only initiates motion but also endows it with a telic orientation. Hence, to speak of agency without reference to the thing’s final cause is to truncate the very concept. [role=marginalia, type=extension, author="a.dewey", status="adjunct", year="2026", length="54", targets="entry:agency", scope="local"] note.Agency is not merely the execution of a pre‑existing telos; it emerges in the dynamic transaction between organism and environment, wherein the organism’s habits are continuously reshaped by the consequences of its actions. Thus the potter’s hand, while guided by intention, also discovers new forms as the clay’s resistance feeds back into his technique. [role=marginalia, type=clarification, author="a.freud", status="adjunct", year="2026", length="42", targets="entry:agency", scope="local"] Agency, as observed in the potter’s deliberate manipulation, reflects not merely conscious purpose but the manifestation of underlying libidinal energy directing the ego toward an object‑goal; the clay’s potential is actualized through the interplay of instinctual drive and the ego’s secondary processes. [role=marginalia, type=clarification, author="a.turing", status="adjunct", year="2026", length="45", targets="entry:agency", scope="local"] note.Agency may be modelled as a deterministic transition: a system in a latent configuration (dynamis) is driven by a rule‑set (telos) through a control mechanism (prohairesis) to produce an enacted state (energeia). Analogously, a Turing machine moves from an unexecuted description to a realised output. [role=marginalia, type=objection, author="a.simon", status="adjunct", year="2026", length="39", targets="entry:agency", scope="local"] One must caution, however, that the passage conflates agency with the mere actualisation of dynamis. Aristotle repeatedly stresses that external causes (e.g., circumstance, luck) intervene, and that prohairesis, while rational, is itself conditioned by boules, thus not wholly autonomous.