ABSTRACT
My suggestion, in short, is that Anscombe’s A – D order is an ordering of elements united in such a way as to satisfy (Telic Explanation) and (Agential Awareness), and that, if Anscombe is right, this form of unity is essential and specifi c to the form of event intentional action is. It is essential to the extent that the applicability of Anscombe’s why-question genuinely characterizes the class of events that are actions; and it is specifi c inasmuch as the mode of order or unity brought out by this question belongs specially to just these events. I will not attempt to defend these claims here: to do so would be to argue for the adequacy of Anscombe’s account of action. My concern in the present essay is to make clear what sort of account is on off er and to show how its availabilty depends on the availability of a certain conception of the temporality of action and practical thought. 16 For present purposes, the crucial point is that, in the proposed characterization of this form of unity of phases in an overarching process, we do not leave either the point of view of the agent or the description of material processes themselves. The elements of causality and mind that the decompositional approach represents as separable elements in an account of action, distinct from the characterization of the material process (what happens) that constitutes the action proper, appear in this story as structuring features of the relevant sort of material process itself: we are concerned with a kind of event or process whose principle of unity just is that the parts should come about because of the subject’s apprehension of their contribution to a certain whole. If this characterization succeeds, we will have characterized an essentially self-conscious, self-constituting form of material progress, and thereby clarifi ed what sort of thing an intentional action could be.
