Hans Bernhard Schmid

The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Fifth Conference on Collective Intentionality held at the University of Helsinki August 31 to September 2, 2006 and two additional contributions. The common aim of the papers is to explore the structure of shared intentional attitudes, and to explain how they underlie the social, cultural and institutional world. The contributions to this volume explore the phenomenology of sharedness, the concept of sharedness, and also various aspects of the structure of collective intentionality in general, and of the intricate relations between sharedness and normativity in particular. Concepts of Sharedness shows how rich and lively the philosophical research focused on the analysis of collective intentionality has become, and will provide further inspiration for future work in this rapidly evolving field.

According to most authors, collective moral responsibility involves collective agency, the nature and structure of which are subject to intense scrutiny in contemporary philosophical research. This paper argues that Aristotle’s theory of friendship includes an important insight into how it is that agency can be shared among us. The activities into which we are jointly engaged are ours, collectively (rather than yours and mine, distributively), through our being plurally self-aware of them as ours, collectively. While the Aristotelian account suggests that this awareness is pre-reflective, Aristotle also has an account of the value of becoming reflectively clear about what it is we are doing together and about how it is that we are doing it.

The concept of the we-mode plays a central role in Raimo Tuomela’s work. In his account, the we-mode is the form of intentionality at work in joint action. The suggestion is that typical forms of joint action involve collective intentionality, and that the distinction between individual intentionality and collective intentionality concerns the intentional mode rather than just the content of the intentional attitudes in question. This paper examines this claim and argues for a plural subject view of collective intentionality.