Reviews for Actions

The average rating for Actions based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-07-02 00:00:00 Kenneth So Goodreads' summary is of course nonsense: philosophers were discussing and theorising about the emotions for as long as we have any records of them. It didn't start in the 50s, as Anthony Kenny is well aware, since he references (and criticises) views from Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes and Hume. What started in the 50s, in Anglophone philosophy, was the new area called "the philosophy of action". This emerged in the wake of Wittgenstein's later writings, and the parallel works he inspired by Gilbert Ryle and Elizabeth Anscombe. All these thinkers repudiated the Cartesian model of a detached intelligence, attending to private sensory objects and utterly mysterious in how it interacted with the physical world. Instead came in an emphasis on criteria, identification, public knowledge and practice, and close attention to how every day language was used, to avoid stultifying simplifications and misconceptions which (allegedly) were the usual fruits of the old style of philosophising. In this work Kenny exposes the hidden Cartesianism still lurking in Hume and the empiricists who imagined themselves free of the taint. Behaviourism and experimental psychology generally gets put in its place for trading in conceptual confusions (at least with respect to studying emotions). Ryle and Anscombe also get corrected for their perceived missteps. Ordinary language is examined, but Kenny noted when its distinctions are not illuminating or important, and he is happy to put up his own theory of volition. Donald Davidson took some of these ideas forward in his essays on actions and events. Altogether this is mostly a period piece, its best ideas having been taken forward since then. It's a good example of what "Oxford philosophy" actually was like at its best. Brentano and Husserl do get examined.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-10-05 00:00:00 Andrew Gray This work is something of a seminal piece in the understanding of the philosophy of human action. It starts with Descartes (or to some extent with Aristotle) and looks at how following philosophers have approached issues such as motive, emotion, will and such like. The book critiques the ideas it surveys and builds a new theory of human action. My one disappointment was that it did not fulfill its promise to look at the emerging findings of psychology in formulating the new theory. Perhaps in places it did so, but I think psychology has added a great deal of flesh on those bones - although much of that was long after this book was first published in 1963, so it would be wrong to be overly critical on this point. A very interesting review of the subject.