Intention

Rating:
Summary: A masterful monograph on human action
Review: 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 and 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 conventionally; how reasons for action differ from its causes. With admirable brevity, Anscombe manages to open up several lines of enquiry into human action in general, and 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 and 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 her intentions at the time - if there was a 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, and one that does not have a family of words corresponding exactly to the English 'intention' and 'intentional' (with all their syntactic 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 - and 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, and 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.

Rating:
Summary: Reflections on an oft-neglected subject
Review: G.E.M. Anscombe, a student of Wittgenstein, uses an approach that is reminsicent of her old teacher by dividing her book into individual reflections on aspects of what it means to intend to do something. This method invites the reader to meditate on this topic and does a powerful job to help one realize what a mystery intention is, and shows just how much depth there is to human action and interpersonal relations. Anscombe, who just died earlier in 2001, is rightfully considered one of the greatest English speaking philosophers of the 20th century, and this work is a magnificent example of her genius.

Rating:
Summary: the road to knowledge is paved with good intentions
Review: The nature of intention can run far deeper than one would imagine. As a student of Wittgenstein, Anscombe's style in these pages very much resembles that of the maister; but the arguments and her reflections on the nature of intention are a unique contribution to the field. Although this work was published in '57, it is always a great pleasure to return to the writers of the Anglo-analytic tradition, so abruptly interrupted by the fashionable continental craze of the late '60s.

Rating:
Summary: That Portion Of Belief We Rend,
Review: When We First Practice To Intend.

With all due respect to a trusted former acquaintance, Jerry Nora gives entirely too cheery a prognosis with respect to the reception of this work by Elizabeth Anscombe (guardian of the Wittgensteinian corpus and great enemy of Hume): although Anscombe here demonstrates as solid a grasp as can be expected of Wittgensteinian methods for dealing with philosophical issues of agency (i.e., does the master one better with respect to the distinction between reasons and motives as causes of action), in her (defendedly) butter-fingered handling of oblique intention, a central category of the common law, Anscombe set a standard for the philosophy of law which has been met time and again. If you like Wittgenstein, you'll love this; if you like Wittgenstein, there might be a reason why.

In the US we once had Montesquieu and plenty precedents; now some "elitist" culture and a mere slip of the pen qualifies as "legal naturalism", i.e. "hard-headed" thinking about a rather extensive and lettered social system -- and of course issues of agency are necessary to "make mind matter more". But Anscombe's proffered internecine dispute with a Jesuitical attitude towards intention hardly justifies the rather fanatical focus on this book (rather than Austin's contemporary work, or even more exotic items) as the font of action theory and a support for that of Donald Davidson (he of another war-and-fascism league) -- this is really something like the beginning of a "critical legal theory" which profiteth no one, and if Anscombe did not frequently divest herself of convictions her followers cannot be blamed for doing so. Please to note the price of this book, page-for-page on a par with the Macmillan *Philosophical Investigations*: please for you to think about what you already knew about such things, and how.