Reason and agency

Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society

Volumn 97, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 263-280

  Pink, Thomas ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77952466913     PISSN: 00667374     EISSN: 14679264     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9264.00016     Document Type: Review

References (21)

1. 'Intending' pp. 86-7 in D. Davidson Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)
2. 'Intending' p. 90
3. Davidson puts forward the view of intention motivation which follows on pp. 213-14 of his replies in Essays on Davidson eds B. Vermazen and M. Hintikka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)
4. Leviathan (1651) chapter 6, p. 44. References are to the edition of R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
5. I endorse, as essential to a practical reason-based account of agency, Aquinas's conception of the human will as a rational or reason-applying appetite. But I omit from the main text, as inessential to a practical reason-based account, a further important aspect of Aquinas's conception of the will - his intellectualism. Aquinas conceived the will - our capacity for decision making and intention formation - as tied to our deliberative capacity to reflect and form practical judgments about how we should act. As involving the will, human actions, in Aquinas's view, were based on a view of the good. The acts of electio by which we decide to perform actions A were given their content by corresponding judgments that it would be good to do A. The will was notionally a power distinct from the intellect: but its actual operations were conceived by Aquinas as integrated with and informed by a corresponding exercise of the practical intellect. In my The Psychology of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) I defend a rival, voluntarist theory which firmly distinguishes intellect and will. On this theory, our capacity for decision making and intention is still a rational appetite - a capacity for applying reason. For the will has precisely the function of executing practical judgments about how we should act. But decisions and intentions are quite distinct from the prior practical judgments which it is their function to execute - so that we can sometimes, irrationally, decide to act contrary to our judgments about how we should act. The will's reason-applying role is purely executive, not deliberative
6. For a typically forceful expression of Hobbes's failure to understand this point, see Leviathan, chapter 6 p. 44: The Definition of the Will, given commonly by the Schooles, that it is a Rationall Appetite, is not good. For if it were, then there could be no Voluntary Act against Reason
7. Summa Theologiae (1265-74) 1a 2ae q6 a1, p. 54. Page references are to volume 2 of the BAC edition, Madrid 1985
8. There is a translation by J. Oesterle of this part of the Summa dealing with agency entitled Treatise on Happiness (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983)
9. Summa Theologiae 1a 2ae q6 a3 p. 56
10. Elbow Room (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 78
11. See Bonnie Kent Virtues of the Will: the transformation of ethics in the late thirteenth century (Washington, D.C: CUA Press, 1996)
12. A variety of considerations against second order agency are proposed in, for example, the second book of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559)
13. by Hobbes in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance (1656)
14. , and in qualified form in the chapter on power in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
15. Considerations for are to be found in, for example, the nineteenth of Suarez's Metaphysical Disputations (1597)
16. and Bramhall's A Defence of True Liberty from Ante-cedent and Extrinsecall Necessity (1655)
17. See The Psychology of Freedom, chapter 8
18. Institutes of the Christian Religion book 2, chapter 2, 'The knowledge of God the Redeemer', pp. 270-1 - page reference to volume 1 of the translation by F.L. Battles, ed. J. T. McNeill (London:S.C.M. Press, 1961)
19. Institutes of the Christian Religion op. cit. p. 286
20. See Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), book 2, part 3, section 3 'Of the influencing motives of the will'. Page references will be to the edition of L.A. Selby-Bigge/P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978)
21. Treatise p. 399