Volume 61, Issue 3

In the following essay, Thomas Nagel points out several ways to answer the so-called “cosmic question” concerning the ultimate sense or nonsense of the universe. Up to our own day philosophical thinking has been divided into two parts: on the one hand the Platonic part inspired by an irreducible religious temperament and on the other hand the secular part, mostly following a naturalistic, nonreligious world view. Despite promising attempts, the existentialist humanism, the “affectless atheism” of scientific naturalism, and even religious Platonism fail to give an appropriate answer to the “cosmic question”. Therefore Nagel feels compelled to be content with a “sense of the absurd”.

“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 argue that in order to understand intentional action we have to understand a distinctive kind of practical knowledge - knowledge that is the cause of what it represents. To do so, I begin by identifying two requirements for an adequate understanding of intentional action: (a) someone who acts intentionally has an intention that is the cause of her action; (b) someone who acts intentionally knows what she is doing. My aim is to show that a theory of intentional action that adequately accounts for both requirements will have to be a theory of practical knowledge. Moreover, I argue that a widespread view of practical thought (e. g. intention) stands in the way of a proper account of the relevant notion of practical knowledge. According to this view, a practical thought is composed of two independent elements: a causal force and a content. I end by sketching an alternative view of practical thought, which, I claim, provides a better framework for understanding practical knowledge

According to G. E. M. Anscombe, practical knowledge, an agent’s knowledge of what she is intentionally doing, is not contemplative or speculative; it does not owe its being knowledge to its being derived from what it knows. She argues for this on the ground that practical knowledge can be one of “two knowledges of the same thing”, where the other of the two is speculative. If we try to conceive practical knowledge as speculative, we fall into a hopeless picture in which practical knowledge is provided by “a queer and special seeing eye in the middle of the acting”. I take Anscombe’s thought to be this: practical knowledge is knowledge concerning a happening that the agent may also know speculatively is her doing. I argue that this thesis is not threatened by the possibility of cases in which a happening that the agent knows as her doing would not be available to her to know as her doing if she did not know it speculatively

Modern philosophers writing on action and practical reasoning rarely discuss perception. This is remarkable, not only because acting on the particular objects in one’s environment obviously requires a perceptual awareness of them, but also because perception is central to the account of action and practical reasoning offered by Aristotle, from whom many contemporary philosophers take their inspiration. The pivotal role that Aristotle assigned to perception is now uniformly given to belief, an act of mind or propositional attitude that might concern particulars, but that might equally well concern general laws of nature, probabilities, or rules of logic. This paper aims to recover and demystify the idea of a practical perception. On the one hand, it argues that in order to mediate between a general end and an action performed in pursuit of that end, the minor premise of practical reasoning must concern particulars and must therefore be perceptual. On the other hand, it argues that this same minor premise must be practical, in the sense that it must represent the particular objects about which the agent is reasoning as constituting a field of obstacles and opportunities, or of things to be avoided and pursued

The power to act intentionally is a power to change the world. It differs from other powers to affect change in that the change is of a particular kind. It is a change through thought. Paradigmatically, it begins with the negation of what is as not as it is to be and the setting of an action concept as to be realized. The pursuit of the end is the realizing of the concept. If all goes well, the process culminates in my knowledge that my deed is done. The power to act is, in this sense, the power of reason to change the world according to its concept and to recognize this change as its works. The traditional name for this form of cognition is “practical knowledge”. In the contemporary literature this notion is mostly discussed under the question how the agent knows, what she will do or what she is doing. This goes together with the tendency to conceive of practical knowledge under the title of self-consciousness in the sense of the transparency of thought. The paper argues that this is a mistake. The notion of practical knowledge is not intelligible as long as one focuses only upon the prospective perspective of intentions for the future or intentions in action and leaves knowing what one has done aside. With my knowledge of my done work a kind of self-consciousness enters the scene whose object is not myself, but another in which I see the reality of my will

This essayistic letter examines the actual situation of philosophy in Russia. From the quantitative point of view it seems as if we can be optimistic: Russia’s stock of philosophers and philosophical faculties, departments and institutes is one of the largest in the world. But from the other qualitative point of view, the whole situation is more complicated. First of all, the institutional and moral legacy of ideologically colored Soviet philosophy has not been wholly overcome in theory, teaching practice, selection and training of a new staff. Second, new problems have arisen which are caused by the desire to preserve at all costs the old patterns of behavior and thinking in any external and internal modification of ideas and institutions. As a consequence, philosophy ceases to produce new ideas. Philosophical books and journals cease to be of interest not only to the general public, but also to the philosophers. Non-professionals and students who have not lost their interest in philosophy have to look for ideas in other fields of knowledge, sometimes far removed from academia. And “professional” philosophers have turned their occupation into a boring routine which is left with no choice but to protect the incompetence of its adherents using aggressive methods of institutional bureaucracy and intellectual intolerance