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Intention

By: GEM Anscombe
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674003993
ISBN-13: 9780674003996
Released: 14 Sep 2000
RRP: £13.95
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A masterful monograph on human action - By: , 22 May 2004
Elizabeth Anscombe's brief difficult book sets out to discredit the idea that an intention to do something is a state of mind, however fleeting & subliminal, which precedes the agent's doing it. In a series of short dense essays without titles, Anscombe discusses a whole set of issues that surround her central claim - how the agent knows what she wants to do, for instance; or whether an action can be described as intentional quite apart from what the agent wants to achieve by performing it; or whether intention can only be expressed conventionallly. With admirable brevity, Anscombe manages to open up several lines of enquiry into human action in general, & their interest may in fact be independent of how they illuminate the idea of intention.

Anscombe's treatment of these issues often resembles an effective demolition job, but it would be hasty to conclude that she knocks down various existing theories to replace them with others of her own devising. Rather, she seeks to display the poverty & unfruitfulness of spinning sophisticated philosophical theories out of certain features of our talk about intentions. In Anscombe's view, the fact that we can sensibly ask what someone's intentions were when she was getting married, for instance, should not be taken to imply that the question has a determinate answer only if she did indeed have a distinct thought about his intentions at the time - if there was an conscious episode in her mental life that could be described as intending something. If you are ready to have your theoretical wings clipped, this is the book for you.

Reading 'Intention' induces a strange kind of instability. On the one hand, you wonder if it isn't just a controversy over how to define words, or how to carve out a region of human action that lends itself to description in terms of the concepts of intention, voluntariness or freedom. If you happen to be at home in a language other than English, & one that does not have a family of words corresponding to the English 'intention' & 'intentional' (with alll their prepositional complements), you might be inclined to see Anscombe's results as profoundly contingent - as laying out how some speakers of a particular language supposedly make sense of their actions. On the other hand, you also find yourself realising that what she is after is not merely local: that it has to hold of human action in general - & that her distinctions capture something that must be acknowledged, even if her analyses do not always conform to 'intentional' as the word is used in ordinary English. This sense of instability comes out very clearly in her example of St Peter's denial of Jesus: somehow I wish it didn't have to be described as an intentional act, & yet I find it terrifying that to describe it otherwise - as a sheer reflex of fear, for example, or a mindless automatic response - would be to falsify it completely.