ABSTRACT

The practical reasoning by which inchoate intentions are transformed into choices to act here and now were largely confined to tidying up the work of Aristotle and his medieval followers, and putting it into acceptable semantic form. Objections have been raised to transforming the study of intention largely into a study of planning. Intention has a place among the appetitive attitudes analogous to that of belief among the cognitive ones. Against this interpretation of his examples, Bratman argues that it would be impossible to co-ordinate plans if we did not demand that it be possible that all of them be carried out. From the point of view both of traditional morality, and of common law so far as it has been formed by common morality, the most important question about intention is what features of an action fall within its agent's intention—are secundum intentionem, and what lie beyond it—are praeter intentionem.