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Making Room for Bodily Intentionality
Abstract.
The
received view in contemporary philosophy of action, inspired and
sustained largely by Donald Davidson and his followers, holds that an
action is intentional if and only if it is caused in the right way by
beliefs and desires. In what follows below I discuss Merleau-Ponty’s
account of bodily intentionality, with the aim of showing that it offers
us an account of a form of intentional behavior that cannot be
understood in terms of causally efficacious mental states like beliefs
and desires. The aim, in short, is to show that, however things may
stand with other forms of intentional behavior (deliberate action, for
example), bodily intentional behavior is autonomously intentional—it
doesn’t derive its intentionality from the intentionality of mental
states.
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