Anscombe's Intention

Abstract

This book provides a careful, critical, and appropriately contextualized presentation of the main lines of argument in G.E.M. Anscombe’s seminal book, Intention, at a level appropriate to the advanced undergraduate but also capable of benefiting specialists in action theory, ethics, and the history of analytic philosophy. It begins by situating Anscombe’s project in relation to the controversy she initiated over the decision by the University of Oxford to award an honorary degree to Harry Truman, and the connection she saw between her Oxford colleagues’ willingness to excuse Truman’s murderous actions and the situation of moral philosophy at the time. It also documents many of the ways Anscombe drew on the thought of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein, as well as the points at which her argument engages with the work of then-contemporary authors, especially R.M. Hare and Gilbert Ryle. Against this background, the primary focus of the book is on presenting Anscombe’s arguments and assessing the plausibility and philosophical power of the position she develops. Topics that receive especially close attention include: Anscombe’s argument that the primary role of the concept of intention is in the description of what happens in the world, and not of an agent’s state of mind; her account of action as a teleological unity; the relation between rationalizing explanation and causal explanation; the difference between practical and theoretical reasoning; and the possibility of non-observational self-knowledge of what one intentionally does.

Practical understanding

“…Some discussions of SER, such as recent interpretations of Anscombe's Intention (e.g. Frey, 2019; Schwenkler, 2020; Small, 2012) do not foreground knowledge‐of‐what‐one‐is‐doing. Do these existing views already accommodate what I have argued for even if they don't use the language of understanding?…”

On the nature of implicit motives

“…An account in which the nature of motivated behavior, or action, takes center stage and that is receiving a growing amount of attention, is Anscombe's (1963;see, e.g., Ford et al, 2011;Schwenkler, 2019;Wiseman, 2017). Anscombe argues that actions have a means-end structure.…”

Knowledge, Practical Knowledge, and Intentional Action

“…We do so by introducing a new kind of case, one that, we argue, centers the agent's control appropriately and thus improves on Davidson's well-known carbon copier case. In Section 2 we introduce the case, offer an initial argumentwhich leans on the idea that intentional action and knowledge have different levels of permissiveness regarding failure in similar circumstances-consider friendly recent arguments due to Piñeros Glasscock (2020) and Schwenkler (2019), and consider the objection that our argument relies too heavily on the notion of safety. In Section 3 we consider how the argument might apply to certain understandings of practical knowledge-knowledge that Anscombe famously claimed is 'the cause of what it understands ' (2000: 87-88).…”