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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Contemporary writing on human action sometimes distinguishes a presentoriented form of intentionality from a future-oriented form. Tense is then invoked mainly for a classificatory purpose, with little regard in this context to whether it may not have analytical (and therefore closer) connections with intentionality in general. That merits some surprise, in view of the crucial role assumed, in current debate between A- and B-theories of time on the subject of tense, by a wider intentionality that extends to cognitive and other mental states. In the wider context there is room for an interesting antithesis between analyses of the temporal in terms of intentionalistic concepts and retroanalyses that go the other way.
1 E.g., those of Davidson, Donald (his principal target) in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Goldman, Alvin in A Theory of Human Action (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970)Google Scholar; Hornsby, Jennifer in Actions (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980)Google Scholar; O'Shaughnessy, Brian in The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Harman, Gilbert in Change in View (Boston: MIT Press, 1986)Google Scholar and John Searle in Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
2 In Bratman, Michael E., Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).Google Scholar
3 See Rankin, Kenneth, “The Noncausal Self-Fulfilment of Intention,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 9, 4 (October 1972): 279–90.Google Scholar
4 See further Rankin, Kenneth, The Recovery of the Soul: An Aristotelian Essay on Self-Fulfilment (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
