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However the eleven Uhlan regiments continued in existence until 1918, armed with the standard cavalry sabre.

During the Second Boer War, British troops successfully used the lance on one occasion - against retreating Boers at the Battle of Elandslaagte (21 October 1899).

However, the Boers made effective use of trench warfare, rapid-fire field artillery, continuous-fire machine guns, and accurate long-range repeating rifles from the beginning of the war.

The combined effect was devastating, so much of the British cavalry was deployed as mounted infantry, dismounting to fight on foot.

For some years after the Boer War, the six British lancer regiments officially carried the lance only for parades and other ceremonial duties.

At the regimental level, training in the use of the lance continued, ostensibly to improve recruit riding skills.

In 1909, the bamboo or ash lance with a steel head was reauthorized for general use on active service.

The Russian cavalry (except for the Cossacks) discarded the lance in the late 19th century, but in 1907, it was reissued for use by the front line of each squadron when charging in open formation.

In its final form, the Russian lance was a long metal tube with a steel head and leather arm strap.

It was intended as a shock weapon in the charge, to be dropped after impact and replaced by the sword for close combat in a melee.

While demoralizing to an opponent, the lance was recognized as being an awkward encumbrance in forested regions.

The relative value of the lance and the sword as a principal weapon for mounted troops was an issue of dispute in the years immediately preceding World War I.

Opponents of the lance argued that the weapon was clumsy, conspicuous, easily deflected, and inefficient in a melee.

Arguments favoring the retention of the lance focused on the impact on morale of having charging cavalry preceded by "a hedge of steel" and on the effectiveness of the weapon against fleeing opponents.

In initial cavalry skirmishes in France this antique weapon proved ineffective, German uhlans being "hampered by their long lances and a good many threw them away".

A major action involving repeated charges by four regiments of German cavalry, all armed with lances, at Halen on 12 August 1914 was unsuccessful.

Amongst the Belgian defenders was one regiment of lancers who fought dismounted.

With the advent of trench warfare, lances and the cavalry that carried them ceased to play a significant role.

A Russian cavalry officer whose regiment carried lances throughout the war recorded only one instance where an opponent was killed by this weapon.

The Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22 saw an unexpected revival of lances amongst the cavalry of the Turkish National Army.

During the successful Turkish offensives of the final stages of the war across the open plains of Asia Minor, Turkish mounted troops were armed with bamboo shafted-lances taken from military storage and inflicted heavy losses on the retreating Greek Army.

Those armies which still retained lances as a service weapon at the end of World War I generally discarded them for all but ceremonial occasions during the 1920s and 1930s.

An exception was the Polish cavalry, which retained the lance for combat use until either 1934 or 1937, but contrary to popular legend did not make use of it in World War II.

German cavalry retained the lance (the Stahlrohrlanze) as a service weapon until 1927, as did British cavalry until 1928.

It made limited use of this weapon in small detachments during the 1870s, intended to impress indigenous peoples.

The modern Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the North-West Mounted Police's descendant, employs ceremonial, though functional, lances made of male bamboo.

They feature a crimped swallowtail pennant, red above and white below, symbolic of the long plain cloth that was wrapped just below the sharp metal tip for absorbing blood fluid to keep it from running down the shaft and making the lance slippery to hold on to and control.

The New South Wales Mounted Police, based at Redfern Barracks, Sydney, Australia, carry a lance with a navy blue and white pennant on ceremonial occasions.

A halberd (also called halbard, halbert or Swiss voulge) is a two-handed pole weapon that came to prominent use during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.

The word halberd is most likely equivalent to the German word Hellebarde, deriving from Middle High German halm (handle) and barte (battleaxe) joined to form helmbarte.

Troops that used the weapon were called halberdiers.

The halberd consists of an axe blade topped with a spike mounted on a long shaft.

It always has a hook or thorn on the back side of the axe blade for grappling mounted combatants.

It is very similar to certain forms of the voulge in design and usage.

The halberd was usually 1.5 to 1.8 metres (5 to 6 feet) long.

The word has also been used to describe a weapon of the Early Bronze Age in Western Europe.

As the halberd was eventually refined, its point was more fully developed to allow it to better deal with spears and pikes (and make it able to push back approaching horsemen), as was the hook opposite the axe head, which could be used to pull horsemen to the ground.

A Swiss peasant used a halberd to kill Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, decisively ending the Burgundian Wars in a single stroke.

Researchers suspect that a halberd or a bill sliced through the back of King Richard III's skull at the Battle of Bosworth.

The halberd was the primary weapon of the early Swiss armies in the 14th and early 15th centuries.

Later, the Swiss added the pike to better repel knightly attacks and roll over enemy infantry formations, with the halberd, hand-and-a-half sword, or the dagger known as the Schweizerdolch used for closer combat.

The German Landsknechte, who imitated Swiss warfare methods, also used the pike, supplemented by the halberd—but their side arm of choice was a short sword called the Katzbalger.

By 1588, official Dutch infantry composition was down to 39% arquebuses, 34% pikes, 13% muskets, 9% halberds, and 2% one-handed swords.

By 1600, troops armed exclusively with swords were no longer used and the halberd was only used by sergeants.Olaf van Nimwegen.

While rarer than it had been from the late 15th to mid 16th centuries, the halberd was still used infrequently as an infantry weapon well into the mid 17th century.

The armies of the Catholic League in 1625, for example, had halberdiers comprising 7% of infantry units, with musketeers comprising 58% and armored pikemen 35%.

By 1627 this had changed to 65% muskets, 20% pikes, and 15% halberds.

A near-contemporary depiction of the 1665 Battle of Montes Claros at Palace of the Marquises of Fronteira depicts a minority of the Portuguese and Spanish soldiers as armed with halberds.

Antonio de Pereda's 1635 painting El Socorro a Génova depicting the Relief of Genoa has all the soldiers armed with halberds.

The most consistent users of the halberd in the Thirty Years War were German sergeants who would carry one as a sign of rank.

While they could use them in melee combat, more often they were used for dressing the ranks by grasping the shaft in both hands and pushing it against several men simultaneously.

They could also be used to push pikes or muskets up or down, especially to stop overexcited musketeers from firing prematurely.Wilson, Peter (2009).

The halberd was one of the polearms sometimes carried by lower-ranking officers in European infantry units in the 16th through 18th centuries.

In the British army, sergeants continued to carry halberds until 1793, when they were replaced by spontoons.

The 18th century halberd had, however, become simply a symbol of rank with no sharpened edge and insufficient strength to use as a weapon.

It served as an instrument for ensuring that infantrymen in ranks stood correctly aligned with each other and that their muskets were aimed at the correct level.

Action theory (or theory of action) is an area in philosophy concerned with theories about the processes causing willful human bodily movements of a more or less complex kind.

This area of thought involves epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, jurisprudence, and philosophy of mind, and has attracted the strong interest of philosophers ever since Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Third Book).

With the advent of psychology and later neuroscience, many theories of action are now subject to empirical testing.

Philosophical action theory, or the philosophy of action, should not be confused with sociological theories of social action, such as the action theory established by Talcott Parsons.

In the simple theory (see Donald Davidson), the desire and belief jointly cause the action.

Michael Bratman has raised problems for such a view and argued that we should take the concept of intention as basic and not analyzable into beliefs and desires.

Aristotle held that a thorough scientific analysis must give an account of both the efficient cause, the agent, and the final cause, the intention.

In some theories a desire plus a belief about the means of satisfying that desire are always what is behind an action.

Agents aim, in acting, to maximize the satisfaction of their desires.

Such a theory of prospective rationality underlies much of economics and other social sciences within the more sophisticated framework of rational choice.

However, many theories of action argue that rationality extends far beyond calculating the best means to achieve one's ends.

For instance, a belief that I ought to do X, in some theories, can directly cause me to do X without my having to want to do X (i.e.

Rationality, in such theories, also involves responding correctly to the reasons an agent perceives, not just acting on wants.

While action theorists generally employ the language of causality in their theories of what the nature of action is, the issue of what causal determination comes to has been central to controversies about the nature of free will.

Conceptual discussions also revolve around a precise definition of action in philosophy.

Scholars may disagree on which bodily movements fall under this category, e.g.

The Battle of Chancellorsville was a major battle of the American Civil War (1861–1865), and the principal engagement of the Chancellorsville campaign.

It was fought from April 30 to May 6, 1863, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, near the village of Chancellorsville.

Two related battles were fought nearby on May 3 in the vicinity of Fredericksburg.

The campaign pitted Union Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker's Army of the Potomac against an army less than half its size, General Robert E. Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

Chancellorsville is known as Lee's "perfect battle" because his risky decision to divide his army in the presence of a much larger enemy force resulted in a significant Confederate victory.

The victory, a product of Lee's audacity and Hooker's timid decision-making, was tempered by heavy casualties, including Lt. Gen. Thomas J.

Jackson was hit by friendly fire, requiring his left arm to be amputated.

He died of pneumonia eight days later, a loss that Lee likened to losing his right arm.

The two armies faced off against each other at Fredericksburg during the winter of 1862–1863.

The Chancellorsville campaign began when Hooker secretly moved the bulk of his army up the left bank of the Rappahannock River, then crossed it on the morning of April 27, 1863.

Crossing the Rapidan River via Germanna and Ely's Fords, the Federal infantry concentrated near Chancellorsville on April 30.

Combined with the Union force facing Fredericksburg, Hooker planned a double envelopment, attacking Lee from both his front and rear.

On May 1, Hooker advanced from Chancellorsville toward Lee, but the Confederate general split his army in the face of superior numbers, leaving a small force at Fredericksburg to deter Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick from advancing, while he attacked Hooker's advance with about four-fifths of his army.

Despite the objections of his subordinates, Hooker withdrew his men to the defensive lines around Chancellorsville, ceding the initiative to Lee.

On May 2, Lee divided his army again, sending Stonewall Jackson's entire corps on a flanking march that routed the Union XI Corps.

While performing a personal reconnaissance in advance of his line, Jackson was wounded by fire after dark from his own men close between the lines, and cavalry commander Maj. Gen. J. E. B. Stuart temporarily replaced him as corps commander.

The fiercest fighting of the battle—and the second bloodiest day of the Civil War—occurred on May 3 as Lee launched multiple attacks against the Union position at Chancellorsville, resulting in heavy losses on both sides and the pulling back of Hooker's main army.

That same day, Sedgwick advanced across the Rappahannock River, defeated the small Confederate force at Marye's Heights in the Second Battle of Fredericksburg, and then moved to the west.

The Confederates fought a successful delaying action at the Battle of Salem Church.

On the 4th Lee turned his back on Hooker and attacked Sedgwick, and drove him back to Banks' Ford, surrounding them on three sides.

Lee turned back to confront Hooker who withdrew the remainder of his army across U.S. Ford the night of May 5–6.

The campaign ended on May 7 when Stoneman's cavalry reached Union lines east of Richmond.

Both armies resumed their previous position across the Rappahannock from each other at Fredericksburg.

With the loss of Jackson, Lee reorganized his army, and flush with victory began what was to become the Gettysburg campaign a month later.

In the first two years of the war, four major attempts had failed: the first foundered just miles away from Washington, D.C., at the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas) in July 1861.

Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign took an amphibious approach, landing his Army of the Potomac on the Virginia Peninsula in the spring of 1862 and coming within of Richmond before being turned back by Gen. Robert E. Lee in the Seven Days Battles.

That summer, Maj. Gen. John Pope's Army of Virginia was defeated at the Second Battle of Bull Run.

In December 1862, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside announced that the Army of the Potomac and attempted to reach Richmond by way of Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he was defeated at the Battle of Fredericksburg.

Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside decided to conduct a mass purge of the Army of the Potomac's leadership, eliminating a number of generals who he felt were responsible for the disaster at Fredericksburg.

In reality, he had no power to dismiss anyone without the approval of Congress.

Predictably, Burnside's purge went nowhere, and he offered President Abraham Lincoln his resignation from command of the Army of the Potomac.

He even offered to resign entirely from the Army, but the president persuaded him to stay, transferring him to the Western Theater, where he became commander of the Department of the Ohio.

Burnside's former command, the IX Corps, was transferred to the Virginia Peninsula, a movement that prompted the Confederates to detach troops from Lee's army under Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, a decision that would be consequential in the upcoming campaign.

Abraham Lincoln had become convinced that the appropriate objective for his Eastern army was the army of Robert E. Lee, not any geographic features such as a capital city, but he and his generals knew that the most reliable way to bring Lee to a decisive battle was to threaten his capital.

Lincoln tried a fifth time with a new general on January 25, 1863—Maj.

Gen. Joseph Hooker, a man with a pugnacious reputation who had performed well in previous subordinate commands.

With Burnside's departure, Maj. Gen. William B. Franklin left as well.

Franklin had been a staunch supporter of George B. McClellan and refused to serve under Hooker, because he disliked him personally and also because he was senior to Hooker in rank.

Maj. Gen. Edwin V. Sumner stepped down due to old age (he was 65) and poor health.

He was reassigned to a command in Missouri, but died before he could assume it.

Gen. Daniel Butterfield was reassigned from command of the V Corps to be Hooker's chief of staff.

Hooker embarked on a much-needed reorganization of the army, doing away with Burnside's grand division system, which had proved unwieldy; he also no longer had sufficient senior officers on hand that he could trust to command multi-corps operations.

He organized the cavalry into a separate corps under the command of Brig.

Gen. George Stoneman (who had commanded the III Corps at Fredericksburg).

Previously, intelligence gatherers, such as Allan Pinkerton and his detective agency, gathered information only by interrogating prisoners, deserters, "contrabands" (slaves), and refugees.

The new BMI added other sources including infantry and cavalry reconnaissance, spies, scouts, signal stations, and an aerial balloon corps.

Hooker's army faced Lee across the Rappahannock from its winter quarters in Falmouth and around Fredericksburg.

Hooker developed a strategy that was, on paper, superior to those of his predecessors.

Hooker reasoned that Lee would react to this threat by abandoning his fortified positions on the Rappahannock and withdrawing toward his capital.

At that time, Hooker's infantry would cross the Rappahannock in pursuit, attacking Lee when he was moving and vulnerable.

Hooker was forced to create a new plan for a meeting with Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and general in chief Henry W. Halleck in Aquia on April 19.

Hooker's second plan was to launch both his cavalry and infantry simultaneously in a bold double envelopment of Lee's army.

Stoneman's cavalry would make a second attempt at its deep strategic raid, but at the same time, 42,000 men in three corps (V, XI, XII Corps) would stealthily march to cross the Rappahannock upriver at Kelly's Ford.

They would then proceed south and cross the Rapidan at Germanna and Ely's Ford, concentrate at the Chancellorsville crossroads, and attack Lee's army from the west.

While they were under way, 10,000 men in two divisions from the II Corps would cross at the U.S. Ford and join with the V Corps in pushing the Confederates away from the river.

The second half of the double envelopment was to come from the east: 40,000 men in two corps (I and VI Corps, under the overall command of John Sedgwick) would cross the Rappahannock below Fredericksburg and threaten to attack Stonewall Jackson's position on the Confederate right flank.

The remaining 25,000 men (III Corps and one division of the II Corps) would remain visible in their camps at Falmouth to divert Confederate attention from the turning movement.

Hooker anticipated that Lee would either be forced to retreat, in which case he would be vigorously pursued, or he would be forced to attack the Union Army on unfavorable terrain.

One of the defining characteristics of the battlefield was a dense woodland south of the Rapidan known locally as the "Wilderness of Spotsylvania".

The area had once been an open broadleaf forest, but during colonial times the trees were gradually cut down to make charcoal for local pig iron furnaces.

When the supply of wood was exhausted, the furnaces were abandoned and secondary forest growth developed, creating a dense mass of brambles, thickets, vines, and low-lying vegetation.

Catharine Furnace, abandoned in the 1840s, had recently been reactivated to produce iron for the Confederate war effort.

This area was largely unsuitable for the deployment of artillery and the control of large infantry formations, which would nullify some of the Union advantage in military power.

It was important for Hooker's plan that his men move quickly out of this area and attack Lee in the open ground to the east.

There were three primary roads available for this west-to-east movement: the Orange Plank Road, the Orange Turnpike, and the River Road.

The Confederate dispositions were as follows: the Rappahannock line at Fredericksburg was occupied by Longstreet's First Corps division of Lafayette McLaws on Marye's Heights, with Jackson's entire Second Corps to their right.

Early's division was at Prospect Hill and the divisions of Rodes, Hill, and Colston extended the Confederate right flank along the river almost to Skinker's Neck.

The other division present from Longstreet's Corps, Anderson's, guarded the river crossings on the left flank.

They crossed the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers as planned and began to concentrate on April 30 around the hamlet of Chancellorsville, which was little more than a single large, brick mansion at the junction of the Orange Turnpike and Orange Plank Road.

Built in the early 19th century, it had been used as an inn on the turnpike for many years, but now served as a home for the Frances Chancellor family.

Some of the family remained in the house during the battle.

Hooker arrived late in the afternoon on April 30 and made the mansion his headquarters.

Stoneman's cavalry began on April 30 its second attempt to reach Lee's rear areas.

Two divisions of II Corps crossed at U.S. Ford on April 30 without opposition.

By dawn on April 29, pontoon bridges spanned the Rappahannock south of Fredericksburg and Sedgwick's force began to cross.

Pleased with the success of the operation so far, and realizing that the Confederates were not vigorously opposing the river crossings, Hooker ordered Sickles to begin the movement of the III Corps from Falmouth the night of April 30 – May 1.

By May 1, Hooker had approximately 70,000 men concentrated in and around Chancellorsville.

In his Fredericksburg headquarters, Lee was initially in the dark about the Union intentions and he suspected that the main column under Slocum was heading towards Gordonsville.

Jeb Stuart's cavalry was cut off at first by Stoneman's departure on April 30, but they were soon able to move freely around the army's flanks on their reconnaissance missions after almost all their Union counterparts had left the area.

As Stuart's intelligence information about the Union river crossings began to arrive, Lee did not react as Hooker had anticipated.

He decided to violate one of the generally accepted principles of war and divide his force in the face of a superior enemy, hoping that aggressive action would allow him to attack and defeat a portion of Hooker's army before it could be fully concentrated against him.

He became convinced that Sedgwick's force would demonstrate against him, but not become a serious threat, so he ordered about 4/5 of his army to meet the challenge from Chancellorsville.

These roughly 11,000 men and 56 guns would attempt to resist any advance by Sedgwick's 40,000.

He ordered Stonewall Jackson to march west and link up with Maj. Gen. Richard H. Anderson's division, which had pulled back from the river crossings they were guarding and began digging earthworks on a north-south line between the Zoan and Tabernacle churches.

McLaws's division was ordered from Fredericksburg to join Anderson.

This would amass 40,000 men to confront Hooker's movement east from Chancellorsville.

James S. Wadsworth, John C. Robinson, and Abner Doubleday.

II Corps, commanded by Maj. Gen. Darius N. Couch, with the divisions of Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock and William H. French, and Brig.

Charles Griffin and Andrew A. Humphreys, and Maj. Gen. George Sykes.

VI Corps, commanded by Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick, with the divisions of Brig.

William T. H. Brooks and Albion P. Howe, Maj. Gen. John Newton, and Col. Hiram Burnham.

XI Corps, commanded by Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard, with the divisions of Brig.

Gen. Charles Devens, Jr., and Adolph von Steinwehr, and Maj. Gen. Carl Schurz.

XII Corps, commanded by Maj. Gen. Henry W. Slocum, with the divisions of Brig.

Longstreet and the majority of his corps (the divisions of Maj. Gen. John Bell Hood and Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett, and two artillery battalions) were detached for duty in southeastern Virginia.

The divisions present at Chancellorsville were those of Maj. Gens.

The Chancellorsville campaign was one of the most lopsided clashes of the war, with the Union's effective fighting force more than twice the Confederates', the greatest imbalance during the war in Virginia.

Hooker's army was much better supplied and was well-rested after several months of inactivity.

Lee's forces, on the other hand, were poorly provisioned and were scattered all over the state of Virginia.

Some 15,000 men of Longstreet's Corps had previously been detached and stationed near Norfolk in order to block a potential threat to Richmond from Federal troops stationed at Fort Monroe and Newport News on the Peninsula, as well as at Norfolk and Suffolk.

In light of the continued Federal inactivity, by late March Longstreet's primary assignment became that of requisitioning provisions for Lee's forces from the farmers and planters of North Carolina and Virginia.

As a result of this the two divisions of Maj. Gen. John Bell Hood and Maj. Gen. George Pickett were away from Lee's army and would take a week or more of marching to reach it in an emergency.

After nearly a year of campaigning, allowing these troops to slip away from his immediate control was Lee's gravest miscalculation.

Although he hoped to be able to call on them, these men would not arrive in time to aid his outnumbered forces.

He ordered an advance at 11 a.m. along two roads toward Chancellorsville: McLaws's division and the brigade of Brig.

Gen. William Mahone on the Turnpike, and Anderson's other brigades and Jackson's arriving units on the Plank Road.

Couch's II Corps was placed in reserve, where it would be soon joined by Sickles's III Corps.

The first shots of the Battle of Chancellorsville were fired at 11:20 a.m. as the armies collided.

McLaws's initial attack pushed back Sykes's division.

The Union general organized a counterattack that recovered the lost ground.

Gen. Ambrose Wright up an unfinished railroad south of the Plank Road, around the right flank of Slocum's corps.

This would normally be a serious problem, but Howard's XI Corps was advancing from the rear and could deal with Wright.

Sykes's division had proceeded farther forward than Slocum on his right, leaving him in an exposed position.

This forced him to conduct an orderly withdrawal at 2 p.m. to take up a position behind Hancock's division of the II Corps, which was ordered by Hooker to advance and help repulse the Confederate attack.

Meade's other two divisions made good progress on the River Road and were approaching their objective, Banks's Ford.

Despite being in a potentially favorable situation, Hooker halted his brief offensive.

At the [First] Battle of Fredericksburg (December 13, 1862), the Union army had done the attacking and met with a bloody defeat.

Hooker knew Lee could not sustain such a defeat and keep an effective army in the field, so he ordered his men to withdraw back into the Wilderness and take a defensive position around Chancellorsville, daring Lee to attack him or retreat with superior forces at his back.

Hooker's subordinates were surprised and outraged by the change in plans.

They saw that the position they were fighting for near the Zoan Church was relatively high ground and offered an opportunity for the infantry and artillery to deploy outside the constraints of the Wilderness.

Viewing through the lens of hindsight, some of the participants and many modern historians judged that Hooker effectively lost the campaign on May 1.

Stephen W. Sears observed, however, that Hooker's concern was based on more than personal timidity.

The ground being disputed was little more than a clearing in the Wilderness, to which access was available by only two narrow roads.

The Confederate response had swiftly concentrated the aggressive Stonewall Jackson's corps against his advancing columns such that the Federal army was outnumbered in that area, about 48,000 to 30,000, and would have difficulty maneuvering into effective lines of battle.

Meade's two divisions on the River Road were too far separated to support Slocum and Sykes, and reinforcements from the rest of the II Corps and the III Corps would be too slow in arriving.

As the Union troops dug in around Chancellorsville that night, creating log breastworks, faced with abatis, Lee and Stonewall Jackson met at the intersection of the Plank Road and the Furnace Road to plan their next move.

Jackson believed that Hooker would retreat across the Rappahannock, but Lee assumed that the Union general had invested too much in the campaign to withdraw so precipitously.

If the Federal troops were still in position on May 2, Lee would attack them.