ABSTRACT
John McDowell offers a three-part account of intentions and intentional action comprising: an account of the nature of intentions, a discussion of the connection between intentions, practical reasoning and self-knowledge of intentional action, and a discussion of the content of an intention. In cases where one adjusts one’s footfall to compensate for an unevenness in the surface, one’s competence in walking further determines the shape of the somewhat indeterminate intention to cross the street. The intentions without overt activity are idle, and movements of limbs without concepts are mere happenings, not expressions of agency. The intentions in action are a mark of the deliberateness of actions but they can be the result of prior deliberation or practical reasoning or they can be spontaneous. As a paradigm of human perception and action, phronesis can be both situation–dependent and nevertheless a conceptually structured ability. For rational subjects such as mature human beings, “embodied coping is permeated with mindedness”.
