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An Anscombean account of Cartesianly Preferred Thoughts| old_uid | 12429 |
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| title | An Anscombean account of Cartesianly Preferred Thoughts |
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| start_date | 2016/10/21 |
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| schedule | 10h30-12h30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Bât. Recherche, salle R314 |
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| details | séminaire ‘La philosophie de l'esprit contemporaine’ |
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| summary | In her article “The First Person,” Anscombe draws our attention to two classes of first-person thoughts, “bodily 'I'-thoughts” and “the Cartesianly preferred thoughts,” as she calls them. She goes on to declare that her “bodily 'I'-thoughts” are the paradigm case of thoughts manifesting self-consciousness, whereas “the Cartesianly preferred thoughts are not the ones to investigate if one wants to understand "I" philosophically”. (Anscombe 1975, p. 64).
One might think that by adopting this “bodily account” of 'I'-thoughts Anscombe must have dismissed out of hand what she calls “Cartesianly preferred thoughts”. But that turns out not to be the case. Her view is rather that her bodily account can be extended to the case of Cartesianly preferred thoughts (“CPTs” hereafter). Anscombe did not offer more detail in the article about how such an extended treatment is to be carried out, and she did not seem to have returned to the topic in her later writings either. And as far as I can tell, no other philosophers have followed up the idea she alludes to here. This paper is an attempt to follow up the lead suggested by Anscombe in that seminal article. I show how a “bodily account” of CPTs can be carried out. Here is the gist of what I develop in the paper: the 'I'-thoughts Anscombe takes to be the paradigm case of thoughts expressive of self-consciousness are of a piece with 'I'-thoughts she takes to be expressions of an agent's practical knowledge, or knowledge of what it is that one intends to be doing. Intended and intentional actions, on that account, are “undertakings” which admit the “Why?” question. Now undertakings in that sense come in a wide variety, encompassing human activities ranging from, on one end of the spectrum, mental acts, to the ones occupying the middle range of the gamut, e.g., bodily movements and actions, and to those on the far end which go beyond immediate movements and motions of the body. Here we find the clue needed to extend the “bodily treatment” to CPTs. It turns out that CPT's are just cogito-like thoughts which are expressions of the agent's second-order mental acts, and as such, they are undertakings that admit the Anscombean “Why?” question, in the exact sense in which intended and intentional actions which give rise to bodily 'I'-thoughts admit the same question. Looked from this vantage point, both CPTs and bodily 'I'-thoughts (“BITs” hereafter) turn out to be the same kind of thoughts – thoughts about human undertakings (in Anscombe's sense of the phrase). The only thing that separates them is their relative locations on one and the same spectrum of human undertakings. |
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| responsibles | <not specified> |
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