ABSTRACT
If we want to know why cowards run away from even the slightest danger when others do not, it is not enough to be told that they would not be cowards otherwise. The question is not about our ways of classifying people, but about the reasons why an individual displays certain patterns of behaviour rather than other ones. It is not much less facetious to say that all cowards have a disposition towards running away from even the slightest danger. This answer, though not entirely uninformative, fails to explain why certain people have this disposition and equally fails to explain how the property that realises this disposition translates into cowardly behaviour. Sartre holds our dispositions to consist in the projects we pursue, as we have seen, but this theory remains somewhat obscure until we have understood exactly how it is that our projects are supposed infl uence our behaviour. So long as we think of projects in terms of goals that we deliberate about and work knowingly to achieve, moreover, taking as our paradigms the kinds of goals that characterise our careers or family lives, then the theory will seem entirely implausible. Surely these goals are set as a result of the ways in which people see things, think about them, and feel in response to them, which in turn manifest their characters, and so cannot be used to explain their characters. But this is a distortion of the Sartrean theory of character. In order to see why, we need to investigate just how Sartre thinks that our projects explain the ways in which we see things, think about them, and feel about them.
