Intention by Anscombe: The Philosophy of Action

Overview

Intention (1957) is the short book by G.E.M. Anscombe that founded the modern philosophy of action. In fewer than a hundred pages, Anscombe analyzes the concept of intention — the concept that connects the mind to the world, the agent to the deed — and her analysis has shaped everything that has followed: the philosophy of action, the theory of practical reason, and the ethics of intention, from the doctrine of double effect to the theory of moral responsibility. Philippa Foot described it as "the most important treatment of action since Aristotle," and Donald Davidson's influential theory of action was written in response to it. The book is the foundation on which the modern understanding of what we do — and what we are responsible for — is built.

Author

G.E.M. Anscombe (1919–2001) was one of the most formidable philosophers of the twentieth century, a pupil and colleague of Wittgenstein, the translator of his Philosophical Investigations, and the author of "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958), the essay that revived virtue ethics. Intention was written at the height of her powers, and it established the analytic philosophy of action.

Historical Background

The book belongs to the mid-century revolution in analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein had taught that the philosophical problems are dissolved by the attention to the ordinary use of the words — and Anscombe applied the method to the concept of intention. The question "what is intention?" had been treated by the tradition as a question about an inner mental state; Anscombe showed that the concept is used in a web of questions — "why did you do that?", "what are you doing?", "what are you going to do?" — and that the analysis of the concept is the analysis of the use. The book also belongs to the history of ethics: the account of intention it provides is the ground of the doctrine of double effect and of the distinction between what we intend and what we merely foresee, the distinction that structures the ethics of killing and letting die.

Key Ideas

The book's central analysis is the connection between intention and the question "why?" Anscombe argues that the intention of an action is given by the answer to the question "why did you do that?" — the answer that gives the reason or the purpose — and that the chain of "why" questions reaches the point at which the agent, if they cannot give a reason, stops the chain. The analysis grounds the concept of intentional action: the action is intentional if the question "why?" has application — if the agent could have said what they were doing and why.

The second key idea is the account of practical knowledge. Anscombe argues that the agent's knowledge of their own intentional action is not knowledge by observation but knowledge by being the agent: the person who is writing knows that they are writing not by watching their hand but by doing it. The concept is the ancestor of the modern distinction between the first-person knowledge of the agent and the third-person knowledge of the observer, and it grounds the account of the difference between the action and the mere event: the action is the event with the agent's knowledge and intention.

The third key idea is the connection to ethics. The account of intention provides the analysis of the concepts that the ethics needs: the intended, the foreseen, the means, the end. The doctrine of double effect — the distinction between the harm that is intended and the harm that is merely foreseen — rests on the analysis, and the book is therefore the philosophical ground of one of the most important tools of applied ethics.

Important Passages

The most influential passages of the book are the opening account of the connection between intention and the "why?" question, and the discussion of practical knowledge — "the agent's knowledge of what he is doing is practical knowledge, not speculative knowledge: the knowledge by which the thing is done, not the knowledge by which it is observed." The passages on the chain of "why" questions and the description of the action at different levels — the moving of the arm, the pumping of the water, the poisoning of the inhabitants — are the standard texts of the philosophy of action.

Influence

The influence of Intention is difficult to overstate. It founded the modern philosophy of action: Donald Davidson's "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" was written in response to it, and the entire subsequent literature — on practical reason, on agency, on moral responsibility — descends from it. Its account of intention grounds the doctrine of double effect and the ethics of intention: the distinction between the intended and the foreseen, which structures the debates over euthanasia, the trolley problem, and the ethics of war, is the distinction that Anscombe analyzed. The book remains the foundation of the philosophy of action, and its analysis of practical knowledge remains one of the most original ideas in the twentieth-century philosophy.

Sources

• Anscombe, G.E.M. Intention. Oxford: Blackwell, 1957; 2nd ed. 1963.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "G.E.M. Anscombe" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/anscombe)