ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the core of agency, which is intention, understood as the conscious determination of human activity. It suggests that every intention contains a tacit self-orientation that unifies the plurality of an agent’s movements into a continuum of action. A particularly skillful attempt to deal with those deeper levels of intention-formulation that resist verbalization is Jean-Paul Sartre’s method of “existential psychoanalysis. In real action an agent’s intention tends to reshape itself as the action situation becomes better known, which is to say as the nature of the means as well as that of the end becomes more clear. Reciprocally, this “becoming clear” is itself a function of the intention, for what is judged significant about any means-end relationship will vary to a certain degree from agent to agent. ommon to all specific intentions but exhausted by none of them, the tacit intendo provides the mediation necessary to account for the oneness of any multi-purposed action.
