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The nature of action becomes a special problem for philosophy in the modern era, largely as a result of the influence of the sciences. In a modern scientific view of nature, each event is the unique causal product of past events. This appears incompatible with a view of human beings as purposeful agents, whose actions have meaning. Causal events have no direction, but rather are pushed along by necessary laws. Purposeful events seem to be aimed at some end; their past matters less than where they are going and if they arrive there. In analytic philosophy, where some kind of scientific naturalism is usually assumed, this clash of perspectives is particularly acute, and has led to a number of perplexing and resistant difficulties. In the tradition of existential phenomenology these difficulties have not arisen. In part this has sometimes been a matter of focus; Heidegger, for example, is concerned foremost with ontology, and is not sympathetic to scientific naturalism, and so did not often stray into these questions. In part this has sometimes been a matter of stipulation; for Sartre (1956), the for-itself, the kind of being of human beings, must act, and is unconstrained in its action. Free action is a primitive feature of such beings. But in part this is also sometimes a matter of insight. The notion of beingin-the-world, which plays its most prominent role in the thinking of Heidegger and