Making room for bodily intentionality (Donald Davidson, John Stuart Mill, Carl Hempel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

There is near universal agreement in contemporary debates in philosophy of action that to act intentionally is to act for a reason, and for a reason to be an agent's reason, it must be internalized and reflected in some manner in her propositional attitudes. For Donald Davidson, that idea gets articulated in the claim that behavior is intentional when it is caused by beliefs and desires. While I agree that to act intentionally is to act for a reason, and that such a reason must be the agent's reason, I argue that we should reject the claim that intentional action is action that is caused by beliefs and desires. Given Davidson's decisive objections to the intentionalist alternative to causalism, however, we have to abandon the assumption that to have a reason for action is to have propositional attitudes that stand in a certain relation to action.; In the first two chapters of my dissertation I offer an account of the motivation for the received causal view, and show how the agenda it has set for philosophy of action was one taken over from the covering law causalism found in the work of John Stuart Mill and Carl Hempel. I then analyze the early work of Donald Davidson, and show how he succeeded in undermining the intentionalist alternative to causalism. The third chapter is an extended criticism of Davidson's causalism. The upshot of that criticism is that Davidson's argument for causalism is unconvincing in a way which points us towards a conception of reasons for action that is not mentalist in orientation. In the fourth chapter, I turn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in order to give an account of a form of intentional behavior (Merleau-Ponty's "bodily intentionality") that cannot be understood in terms of the relationship (causal or otherwise) between propositional attitudes and behavior. I argue there that bodily intentionality is autonomously intentional, which is to say that it doesn't derive its intentional character from propositional attitudes. Rather, it is a form of behavior that is best understood in terms of an ability to respond directly to (features of) situations.