Is an agreement an exchange of intentions?

Margaret Gilbert has argued that an agreement is not exchange of promises, since no such exchange plays all the roles she claims are distinctive of agreements. After briefly discussing the notion of intention and the principles governing intentions, I argue that a certain type of exchange of intentions – in which one person forms a conditional intention to act if the other does, and the other forms an unconditional intention to act on the presumption that the first will do what they have said – plays all these roles, and so conclude that an agreement is in fact an exchange of intentions

Recasting analytic philosophy on the problem of evil

In his recent book, A Frightening Love: Recasting the Problem of Evil, Andrew Gleeson challenges a certain conception of justification assumed in mainstream analytic philosophy and argues that analytic philosophy is ill-suited to deal with the most pressing, existential, form of the problem of evil. In this article I examine some aspects of that challenge

Transcending absurdity

Many of us experience the activities which fill our everyday lives as meaningful, and to do so we must (and do) hold them to be important. However, reflection seems to undercut this meaningfulness: our activities are aimed at ends which are arbitrary, those activities are themselves insignificant, and leave little of any real permanence. The aim of this paper is to explore whether this discrepancy is inevitable, and in particular to examine recent formulations of the old idea that we can transcend it by forming attachments less susceptible to being undercut. The paper contrasts the life of doing good (devoted, for example, to working for a moral cause) and the life of knowing good (devoted to the appreciation of the so-called 'higher' things in life, such as art and science) as ways of finding meaning

Tabensky on the unity of life and the skill of living

This paper examines Pedro Tabensky's claims that rational human life has a single unifying purpose, and that there is an analogy between the skill of living and that of painting. It examines his arguments for the first claim, in particular the relation between rationality and different ways in which a life might be unified. For, in addition to the narrative or artistic unification which Tabensky favours, there is also (for example) the possibility of unifying one's life through the adoption of a so-called monolithic end, such as pleasure (assuming that pleasure is monolithic). The paper also investigates the implications of each of these modes of unification for how we should understand the skill of living. According to the narrative or artistic model, living will indeed be like painting; however, according to the monolithic-end model, living may be more like business management; and other models may make other analogies salient. All this will make a difference to our attitudes to events within our lives, for example, whether the inevitable disturbances within our lives are to be integrated or, rather, eliminated

How can intentions make actions rational?

Rational agents, it seems, are capable of adopting intentions which make actions rational and which they would otherwise have no reason to do, or even have reason not to do. Mintoff examines how this is possible and how intentions make actions rational

Did Alcibiades learn justice from the many?

Can virtue be taught by the many? Socrates insists that the perfection of our souls is of supreme importance (Ap. 29d-30a, Cr. 47d-48a, Gorg. 477e), he defines virtue as that which will make our souls good if it comes to be present (Gorg. 506d, cf. Rep. 353b), and he claims that, if we do not already possess virtue, then we should seek some teacher of it (La. 200d-201a, Euthd. 282a-b). We shall assume that he is basically right: that if our ultimate aim is to live well, if this requires us to know how to do so, and if we are unsure whether we already possess this know-how, then we should in the first instance seek some teacher in good living. 1 Who should it be? Not the many, according to Socrates.2 As a general rule, and especially on matters of virtue, he asserts that we should be guided by the one with expert knowledge (assuming he exists) rather than the many, who lack such knowledge (Ap. 25b, Cr. 47b-d, La. 184d-5a, Gorg. 459a). Unlike other interlocutors in other dialogues, Alcibiades disagrees. Having suggested that he has learnt justice from people in general, he meets Socrates' stock assertion that '[w]hen you give the credit to "people in general", you're falling back on teachers who are no good' (Ale. 110e2-3), and he responds with the thought that the many can teach lots of different things. If we aim to live well, this issue is of vital importance. Together with the Great Speech in the Protagoras, the ensuing discussion in the Alcibiades is the most extensive treatment in the Socratic dialogues of the competence (or otherwise) of the general public to teach virtue. Accordingly, we shall approach the issue of whether the general public can teach virtue by examining Socrates' arguments, in particular, that the Greek public did not teach Alcibiades justice

Buridan's ass and reducible intentions

Unlike Buridan's ass, most of us have the capacity to deal with situations in which there is more than one maximally preferable option. According to supporters of a prominent conception of intention, making a decision in this type of case involves coming to prefer, or judge preferable, one of the relevant options over the other. The purpose of this paper is to argue that accounts that reduce intentions to preferences or preferability judgements cannot explain how it is possible to rationally form and to reason from such intentions in Buridan cases. Such accounts commit us to rejecting long-standing philosophical commitments to the relation between: judgement and evidence; reconsideration and new information; preference and judgements of preferability; and (in some versions) commit us to attributing overly complex forms of motivation