Neil Roughley

In the book’s first chapter, the topic of practical mind is approached via a brief survey of a number of important positions in the history of philosophy. The founding question for a philosophy of practical mind is raised by Aristotle when he asks what it is in the soul that originates movement. I discuss the answers to this question proposed by Plato, Aristotle himself, Hobbes and Hume, before rounding off the historical survey with a look at the introduction of the notion of “pro-attitude” in the last century. The key question put to the various proposals concerns their capacity to give a unitary account of what it is that “moves” agents. Put in terms of the last of the suggestions discussed: is there a single pro-component that unites the diverse ways of being for something under one genus? And if so, is that pro-component the feature that moves us?None of the positions surveyed provides adequate answers to these questions. Plato’s modular model of the soul turns out to presuppose the notion of a motivational state. The motivational conception of unity proposed by Hobbes depends on his crude materialist conflation of very different features of mental states. Hume’s hedonistic position runs into problems of coherence at the moment at which he attempts to explain how affect can be motivationally decisive. The twentieth-century notion of pro-attitudes is so formal as to provide no criterion for membership. The most demanding of the theories surveyed, Aristotle’s attempt to establish a criterion of motivational unity under the term “orexis”, also appears, in spite of his explicit aim to the contrary, to be no more than nominal. The relationship between the three forms of orexis, as well as the category’s relationship to both the emotions and to ‘prohairesis’, remain unclear. Here, as in Plato, the attempt to keep ethical and non-ethical motivation separate remains a serious stumbling block. Nevertheless, the introduction of “prohairesis”, that is, of a deliberatively transformed motivational state, is a groundbreaking move, which calls out for integration within a systematic motivational theory.

Viele Kunstphilosophen heute, beispielsweise Vertreter der institutionellen Theorie und der Clusterkonzeption der Kunst, bestreiten, dass zwischen der Kunst und dem Ästhetischen ein begrifflicher Zusammenhang besteht. Sie stützen sich dabei auf der ‚anästhetischen These’, der zufolge es Kunstwerke gibt, die nicht darauf angewiesen sind, in der ästhetischen Einstellung rezipiert zu werden. In diesem Artikel verteidige ich die traditionelle Sicht, dass ein solcher begrifflicher Zusammenhang, auch für anästhetisch erscheinende Werke, besteht.Meine Verteidigung findet in drei Schritten statt. Zuerst werden Analysen der Begriffe der ästhetischen Erfahrung und der ästhetischen Einstellung entwickelt. Dann wird argumentiert, dass paradigmatische Kunstwerke Artefakte sind, die mit dem Zweck hervorgebracht werden, ästhetische Erfahrung auszulösen. Im letzten Schritt wird gezeigt, wie Kandidaten für den Status anästhetischer Kunst zu einer leichten Modifikation dieser Bestimmung Anlass geben, eine Modifikation aber, die die begriffliche Angewiesenheit der Kunst auf die ästhetische Einstellung ihrer Rezipienten festhält

Autonomy and valuing are two significant practical phenomena that have been analysed in terms of higher-order wanting. I argue that reference to higher-order capacities is indeed required to make sense of both concepts, but also that such analyses need a more differentiated understanding of "wanting to want" than has hitherto been proposed. Central for autonomy is the instantiation of four types of optative relationship by an accountable agent under conditions of rationality. Valuing requires the disposition to instantiate only one of the relevant structures. Clarity on this allows an analysis of the precise relationships between the two phenomena.

The last three chapters of the book contain my systematic proposal as to how intentions can be reductively understood whilst accounting for the specificity of the intentional syndrome, in particular whilst allowing us to understand the force of the requirements of intention rationality. The proposal is disjunctive and genetic: I claim that intentions are optative attitudes on which a contextually unique practical status has been conferred, a status that can be conferred by one of two aetiological mechanisms.The first of those mechanisms is decision, the most salient form of intention acquisition. This chapter aims to clarify what it is about deciding that enables it to confer that status. I begin by looking at cases in which deciding goes beyond motivational and evaluative phenomena, cases for which decision theory leaves no room and which are metaphysically overdramatised by Existentialism. In order to get a handle on the feature at work in these cases, I compare the different ways judging and deciding depend on at least minimal forms of theoretical inquiry and practical deliberation respectively. The decisive difference concerns the relationship between the motivations for the relevant form of reflection: whereas it is an essential, internal feature of inquiry that it be powered by a want* which specifies the conditions under which some belief content can count as an answer to the question that inaugurated that inquisitive episode, no such criterial specification of the motivation internal to minimal deliberation can be given. Instead, all that is required here is that the answer to the question that inaugurated deliberation be the deliberator’s own answer. An extended discussion of conceptions of the strong ownership of attitudes (Frankfurt, Korsgaard, Velleman) and of the relationship between conclusives reasons judgements and decisions supports this conclusion. After rejecting the claim that decisions might be actions, I conclude with a constructive proposal, according to which a decision is a conscious optative occurrence seen by its bearer as his own answer to the optative uncertainty that triggered an episode of minimal deliberation and which for that reason causes him to desist from further deliberation on the matter.

It is often claimed that humans are rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral creatures. What these characterizations may all have in common is the more fundamental claim that humans are normative animals, in the sense that they are creatures whose lives are structured at a fundamental level by their relationships to norms. The various capacities singled out by discussion of rational, linguistic, cultural, or moral animals might then all essentially involve an orientation to obligations, permissions and prohibitions. And, if this is so, then perhaps it is a basic susceptibility, or proclivity to normative or deontic regulation of thought and behavior that enables humans to develop the various specific features of their life form. This volume of new essays investigates the claim that humans are essentially normative animals in this sense. The contributors do so by looking at the nature and relations of three types of norms, or putative norms-social, moral, and linguistic-and asking whether they might all be different expressions of one basic structure unique to humankind. These questions are posed by philosophers, primatologists, behavioral biologists, psychologists, linguists, and cultural anthropologists, who have collaborated on this topic for many years. The contributors are committed to the idea that understanding normativity is a two-way process, involving a close interaction between conceptual clarification and empirical research.