ABSTRACT
The concept of personal action is an essential adjunct to the concept of a person, for, as we have seen, it is only on the personal level that explanations proceed in terms of the needs, desires, intentions and beliefs of an actor in the environment. Beyond this, the concept of action plays a critical role in our notions of responsibility and punishment. It is well worth detailed elucidation, therefore, and all the more so because once again the traditional views of intentional action will be seen to founder on a failure to make clear the distinction between the personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. The first step is to characterize the class of intentional actions, and since this task has been brilliantly executed by Miss Anscombe in Intention, I can do no better than to give a précis of her analysis, making a few alterations along the way and then wedding the results to our emerging picture of awareness1.
