# Freedom and the Phenomenology of Agency Martine Nida-Rümelin **Opening (not a real abstract):** In contemporary philosophy of agency, it is considered a central task to account for the difference between actions and other events. But there is, according to the view here presented, a more fundamental distinction to be drawn: the one between active behavior (bodily or mental events brought about in a sense to be explained by the subject concerned) and mere happenings (bodily or mental changes the subject at issue passively undergoes). According to the view here proposed, the capacity to behave in an active manner is not restricted to the human domain and might already have occurred with the emergence of simple forms of consciousness in early stages of biological evolution.1