The action as conclusion

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 31, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 481-505

  Clark, Philip ^a  

^a KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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Indexed keywords

EID: 61249167651     PISSN: 00455091     EISSN: 19110820     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00455091.2001.10717577     Document Type: Review

References (39)

1. This article completes a project I began in an earlier contribution to this journal. See 'Practical Steps and Reasons for Action', Canadian Journal of Philosophy 27 (1997) 17-46. The project is to lay out an account of the practical syllogism that can serve as the basis of a broadly eudaimonistic conception of rational motivation. The earlier paper deals mainly with what lies behind the conclusion.
2. Robert Audi, Practical Reasoning (London: Routledge 1989), 94
3. Joseph Raz, in his introduction to Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1978), 6
4. David Charles, Aristotle's Philosophy of Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1984), 91
5. David Wiggins, 'Weakness of Will, Commensurability, and the Objects of Deliberation and Desire', reprinted with minor revisions in Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Blackwell 1987), 250
6. Donald Davidson, in Vermazen and Hintikka, Essays on Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985), 220
7. Anthony Kenny, Aristotle's Theory of the Will (New Haven: Yale University Press 1979), 142ff.
8. On this response, see Norman Dahl, Practical Reason, Aristotle, and Weakness of the Will (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984), 161.
9. Martha Nussbaum, Aristotle's 'De Motu Animalium': Text with Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978), 40
10. See Alfred Mele', The Practical Syllogism and Deliberation in Aristotle's Causal Theory of Action', New Scholasticism 55(1981), 302.
11. Kenny tries to forestall this objection. True, he says, Aristotle does say the 'I have to make a cloak' is an action. But what this shows, according to Kenny, is that Aristotle is 'willing to call a decision to act "an action'" (Aristotle's Theory of the Will, 143).
12. G. H. von Wright pursues such a view without directly attributing it to Aristotle. See his Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca, NY: Cornell 1971), ch. 3
13. and 'On So-called Practical Inference', Acta Sociologica 15 (1972).
14. See also G. Santas, 'Aristotle on Practical Inference, the Explanation of Action, and Akrasia', Phronesis 14(1969), 176.
15. See Santas, 'Aristotle on Practical Inference', 175ff.;
16. Nussbaum, De Motu, Essay 4, 186;
17. and John R. Welch, 'Reconstructing Aristotle: The Practical Syllogism', Philosophia 21(1991), 79-80.
18. See Santas, 'Aristotle on Practical Inference', 176
19. and Mele, The Practical Syllogism and Deliberation', 299-300.
20. For the opposing view see John Cooper, Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1975), 24-6.
21. Paul Grice and Judith Baker, 'Davidson on "Weakness of the Will", in Vermazen and Hintikka, Essays on Davidson: Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1985), 42
22. Michael Bratman also treats 'ought' judgments as beliefs about the weight of reasons for action, although the reasons he has in mind are relativized to desires of the reasoner. See his Intention, Plans, and Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1987), ch. 3.
23. The distinction between deliberation and the practical syllogism occupies a central place in Davidson's theory. See his Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1980), 16.
24. Essays on Actions and Events, 39ff.
25. Elizabeth Anscombe, Intention (Ithaca, NY: Cornell 1976), 58
26. See e.g. Alan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990).
27. See e.g. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, 99ff.
28. Compare Susan Hurley, Natural Reasons (New York: Oxford University Press 1989), 218.
29. For discussions of the problem of internalism, see David McNaughton, Moral Vision (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1988), 23
30. and Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1994).
31. On the idea that reasoning is an activity in which one aims to 'get it right, 'see David Velleman, 'What Happens When Someone Acts?' Mind 101 (1992)
32. Section XIII, and Gavin Lawrence, "The Rationality of Morality', in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995).
33. This explanation of the motivational magnetism of 'ought' judgments does not commit us to the idea that such judgments are ever true. Nevertheless, we do need some account of what would qualify a step as deserving weight. My own view, which I defend elsewhere, is that steps deserve weight in deliberation in virtue of their connection with things it makes sense to want in one's life, that is, with goods of a certain kind. I defend this view against David Velleman's autonomist alternative in 'Velleman's Autonomism', Ethics 111 (2001) 580-93.
34. See J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977), ch. 1.
35. See Gilbert Harman, 'Practical Reasoning', Review of Metaphysics 79 (1976) 431-63
36. and Change in View (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1986), 85-6.
37. See Ian Rumfit, 'Frege's Theory of Predication: An Elaboration and Defense, with Some New Applications', The Philosophical Review 103(1994), 619. Rumfit develops a view on which the content of an order or intention is a thing done as opposed to a doing.
38. Bruce Vermazen, 'Objects of Intention', Philosophical Studies 71(1993), 224
39. Another defense of propositions as objects of intentions would rest on an analysis of intentions as beliefs. For instance, David Velleman in Practical Reflection (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989) analyzes intentions as special kinds of expectations that one will act. Perhaps it will seem that if Velleman is right, then the 'what' of an intention to act is the proposition that forms the content of the belief. But in fact this does not follow. An analysis of what it is to be in a state with a certain object can leave the object untouched. For instance, some philosophers analyze states of valuing as beliefs. To value learning, on such a view, is to believe that learning is good. It does not follow, though, that what one values is the proposition that learning is good. The object of the valuing is still learning, even though the valuing itself is analyzed as a belief. Similarly, the object of an intention can be an action, even if we analyze the intention itself as a belief.