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Über das Problem des Handelns
Abstract
“On the Problem of Action” contrasts two conceptions of the task of action theory: the dominant conception, which I call the decompositional approach, and an alternative, non-decompositional approach that is implicit in the tradition of action theory descending from Aristotle. Decompositionalists seek to characterize intentional action as a composite of something inward and something outward, bound together by some generic kind of causal relation. I show that this approach is committed to characterizing action in terms that treat the agent’s own standpoint on her action as a separable factor, not integral to the worldly happening that constitutes her action proper, and I argue that this commitment leads decompositionalists to focus their theorizing not on actions-in-progress, but on cases of completed action. I then show how the neo-Aristotelian approach to understanding action contrasts with the decompositional approach in each of these respects: it seeks, not to explain what intentional action is by decomposing action into several not-intrinsically-agential factors, but rather to characterize the understanding of what it is to act implicit in the agent’s knowledge of her own action-in-progress. The main aim of this paper is simply to show that there is an alternative to the decompositional project, one that resists the demand for an explanation of action in non-agential terms, while not simply treating the notion of intentional agency as an unexplained primitive. To see the possibility of this sort of understanding of action is, I argue, to see how action could turn out to be, not a worldly event with certain psychological causes, but a distinctive form of material process, one that is not simply caused by an exercise of reason but is itself a (productive) exercise of reason, it is itself the exercise of a power of practical cognition.
In this paper I develop and defend an interpretation of Anscombe’s philosophy of human action as a philosophy of practical knowledge. This is a philosophy which reframes questions of moral obligation as belonging to the grammar of our talk of human action. But, Anscombe’s account of the grammar of human action is not fully in view in her action-theoretic works. In the first part of the paper I argue that to get her account of the grammar of human action fully into view we need to turn to her view of the spiritual nature of man in her religious writings. In the second part of the paper I offer an interpretation of her view of the spiritual nature of man which shows that, contrary to popular interpretations, hers is a spiritual and not an Aristotelian or neo-Aristotelian philosophy of practical knowledge. I close this paper with a sketch of a spiritual philosophy of practical knowledge which moves along Anscombean lines but abandons talk of God.
The aim of this paper is to display an alternative to the familiar decompositional approach in action theory, one that resists the demand for an explanation of action in non-agential terms, while not simply treating the notion of intentional agency as an unexplained primitive. On this Anscombean alternative, action is not a worldly event with certain psychological causes, but a distinctive form of material process, one that is not simply caused by an exercise of reason but is itself a productive exercise of reason. I argue that to comprehend the proposed alternative requires an account of the temporality of events in general. An event does not simply have a position in time, but is itself temporally structured. With the inner temporality of events in view, the Anscombean conception of action as a specifically self-conscious form of temporal unity is made available for critical reflection.
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