Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Intention by G. E. M. Anscombe ISBN: 0-674-00399-3 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A masterful monograph on human action
Comment: 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: 2
Summary: That Portion Of Belief We Rend,
Comment: 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.
Rating: 4
Summary: the road to knowledge is paved with good intentions
Comment: 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.
 |
Title: Ethics, Religion and Politics: The Collected Philosophical Paper by G. E. M. Anscombe ISBN: 0631133089 Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Pub. Date: 01 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
 |
Title: Essays on Actions and Events (Philosophical Essays of Donald Davidson) by Donald Davidson ISBN: 0199246270 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
 |
Title: Faces of Intention : Selected Essays on Intention and Agency (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy) by Michael E. Bratman, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy, John Haldane, Gilbert Harman, Frank Jackson, William G. Lucan ISBN: 0521637279 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 13 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $28.00 |
 |
Title: The Possibility of Practical Reason by James David Velleman ISBN: 0198238266 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
 |
Title: The Reasons of Love by Harry G. Frankfurt ISBN: 0691091641 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 05 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
