Book | Chapter
(1999) Consciousness and intentionality, Dordrecht, Springer.
Some of the central issues in the ongoing debate on mental causation can be traced back to Donald Davidson's original and controversial views on the role of mind in the causation and explanation of human behaviour. His classic 1963 paper "Actions, Reasons, and Causes' constituted something of a breakthrough in the old-standing controversy between the teleologists and the mechanists on the nature of action-explanation. Not onlycan reasons be causes — Davidson argued against the prevailing opinion of the Ryleans and neo-Wittgensteineans — but unless the reasons that "rationalize" an action actually caused the action, those reasons would not serve to explain the action at all. (Those reasons are, of course, the agent's beliefs and desires relative to which the action can be seen as reasonable or appropriate.) But while this basic thesis was widely endorsed, the 1963 paper did not contain an account of how reasons can be causes; that account was first given by Davidson in his far more controversial 1970 paper "Mental Events".
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-9193-5_13
Full citation:
Marras, A. (1999)., Davidson on intentional causation, in D. Fisette (ed.), Consciousness and intentionality, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 273-285.
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