Abstract
In the book’s first chapter, the topic of practical mind is approached via a brief survey of a number of important positions in the history of philosophy. The founding question for a philosophy of practical mind is raised by Aristotle when he asks what it is in the soul that originates movement. I discuss the answers to this question proposed by Plato, Aristotle himself, Hobbes and Hume, before rounding off the historical survey with a look at the introduction of the notion of “pro-attitude” in the last century. The key question put to the various proposals concerns their capacity to give a unitary account of what it is that “moves” agents. Put in terms of the last of the suggestions discussed: is there a single pro-component that unites the diverse ways of being for something under one genus? And if so, is that pro-component the feature that moves us?
None of the positions surveyed provides adequate answers to these questions. Plato’s modular model of the soul turns out to presuppose the notion of a motivational state. The motivational conception of unity proposed by Hobbes depends on his crude materialist conflation of very different features of mental states. Hume’s hedonistic position runs into problems of coherence at the moment at which he attempts to explain how affect can be motivationally decisive. The twentieth-century notion of pro-attitudes is so formal as to provide no criterion for membership. The most demanding of the theories surveyed, Aristotle’s attempt to establish a criterion of motivational unity under the term “orexis”, also appears, in spite of his explicit aim to the contrary, to be no more than nominal. The relationship between the three forms of orexis, as well as the category’s relationship to both the emotions and to ‘prohairesis’, remain unclear. Here, as in Plato, the attempt to keep ethical and non-ethical motivation separate remains a serious stumbling block. Nevertheless, the introduction of “prohairesis”, that is, of a deliberatively transformed motivational state, is a groundbreaking move, which calls out for integration within a systematic motivational theory.
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Notes
- 1.
Although Aristotle’s concept of the soul is much broader than the modern notion, including the vegetative and the visceral, he quickly excludes the latter features as irrelevant for the kind of “forward movement” that interests him (DA 432b15ff.).
- 2.
I prefer this non-everyday terminology to the frequently used “best judgement”, which is ambiguous as to whether the judgement is best as measured against external standards (the best judgement an agent could have made) or involves judging that a course of action would be the best all things considered. It is the latter that “optimising” – as opposed to “optimal” – “value judgement” is intended to pick out.
- 3.
The claim that “desire” necessarily aims at the good is frequently labelled the “guise of the good” thesis, a thesis that is in turn sometimes taken to be uncontroversially Aristotelian (e.g. Tenenbaum 2010b, 4). Katja Vogt argues persuasively that the claim in Aristotle concerns “background motivation” to lead a life that goes well, an orientation that may impose no more than side-constraints on many of our individual motivations (Vogt unpublished, 12ff.).
- 4.
My emphasis.
- 5.
Boyle and Lavin (2010) argue that the guise of the good thesis in Aristotle indeed has the status of a conceptual claim.
- 6.
Here, I am following the translation used by C.D.C. Reeve (Reeve 2012, 26).
- 7.
Reeve certainly thinks he has. Cf. Reeve 2012, 26ff.
- 8.
In the former work, Aristotle entitles the second group of passions “orgē”, which Cooper (1999, 251) interprets as synonymous with “thumos”.
- 9.
Aristotle does remark briefly that the bad or incontinent man will engage in “calculation” (“logismos”), perhaps effectively (EN 1142b17-20). He also names the instrumental faculty of “cleverness” (“deinotes”) that may be possessed by the former as the degenerate version of practical wisdom (“phronesis”), the latter being necessary for genuine deliberation (EN 1144a23-29). There is however, as far as I can see, virtually no elaboration of how reflection in these cases might proceed.
- 10.
Tom Sorell puts the point slightly more politely. He describes Hobbes as pursuing an empirical, rather than a semantical reconstruction. According to such a project, the precise way our linguistic terms fit together with the mechanisms that cause behaviour is relatively uninteresting (Sorell 1986, 90ff.). Still, Hobbes does seem to think that some terms from our everyday language do pick out the basic motivational concepts.
- 11.
- 12.
Peters and Tajfel argue that the theories of both Hobbes and the behaviourist psychologist C.L. Hull are invalidated by their failure to respect the logical difference between the physical concept of motion and the psychological concept of striving (Peters and Tajfel 1958, 33). On Hull, see below Section 3.3.1.
- 13.
John Bricke, who, like Kenny (1963, 25, note), thinks Hume’s official theory commits him to “denying the intentionality of desire”, suggests that a proposal along the above lines would be a “modest revision” of Hume’s official theory (Bricke 1996, 39ff.). Setiya argues that Hume was in fact articulating the very distinction between representing a content in a doxastic and in a “passionate” mode that Kenny and Bricke see him as rendering incomprehensible. Setiya’s claim rests on the philological detail that in the eighteenth century, unlike today, commas could introduce restrictive relative clauses. According to Setiya, Hume’s claim is incomplete until one adds that a passion “contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy of any other existence or modification”. What passions don’t contain are thus particular sorts of representations, namely those that copy features of the world, not representations tout court (Setiya 2004, 374f.). This would indeed be a way of rendering this passage consistent with the main thrust of Hume’s discussion of the passions. However, it seems to be less consistent with the way the quotation continues, as Hume goes on to assert that being angry – like being thirsty, sick or more than five feet high – involves “no reference” to any other object.
- 14.
There is also such a widespread philosophical usage. See Chapter 2, note 11.
- 15.
My emphasis.
- 16.
Recall that Plato’s use of “epithumia” faced a similar problem.
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Roughley, N. (2016). The Question of Motivational Unity: Historical Preliminaries. In: Wanting and Intending. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 123. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7387-4_1
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