philosophy of action

The dates for deciding what courses to offer at the department arrive earlier and earlier due to - surprise, surprise - increasing bureaucracy. At first I was a bit fed up with it all, but then I got the idea that it would be quite fun to offer a seminar on Simone Weil. I am no expert - there are others at the department who know her work much better than I, a mere amateur, do. But what the hell - it'd be rewarding for me as well to read more Weil, as that belongs to the plans anyways (she has written a great deal about labour, my prime philosophical interest). Let's see if anybody's interested.

This autumn a friend of mine and I were "managing" a course on the philosophy of action. My first experience of teaching. I expected it to be a lot worse than it actually was: I feared sleepless nights and drinking myself to death in two weeks in pure desperation. On the other hand, teaching dry analytic philosophy - to which I am not really that accustomed myself - involves quite a few challenges, the main two of which were a) explaining why analytic philosophers are so bloody technical (I hope we didn't lapse into Apologetics) and b) explaining why philosophers have been tempted to defend truly abstract and strange pictures of 'action' and 'intention'. The big risk here is that the whole thing - devoting one's energies to analytic philosophers like Davidson, Bratman and Audi - comes to appear quite futile: first you present some ideas that at first glance seem totally outrageous, then you try to make it clear why Davidson & co might be quite interesting after all. After that you return to saying: 'well, isn't these ideas quite ridiculous anyway, even if we now are a little more familiar with the philosophical force of "a neutral picture of action".' I hope our students didn't think about it in that way, but it was bothering me throughout the course. Our being "wishy-washy".

During my first years of studying philosophy, I was constantly worrying about philosophy inspired by Wittgenstein being "destructive", "not going far enough". It took me a few years to realize that my conception of philosophy and its tasks was not very clear from the outset. My conception about what philosophy is to "do" was very abstract. I don't know whether this has gotten any clearer now, but at least I am not bothered by that specific thing anymore. Usually - at times the old worries return to haunt me.

I hope we managed to convey to the students that a familiarity with the problems discussed in philosophy of action - the relation between intention and action for example, or the idea that actions are bodily movements "plus something more" - helps one get a perspective on a form of "scientific blindness" in analytic philosophy on a wider level. Applying what most resembles scientific models to things that cannot be dealt with in that way - at least not primarily. Fos this reason, we talked at length about the difference between empirical questions and conceptual questions, as this division is particularly muddled in the philosophy of action. Some philosophers are terribly unclear about what it is they are doing when they are structuring "a theory of action" - conceptual remarks? empirical remarks about a phenomenon and "the constitution of the action-machinery"? I suspect that Bratman's crew - the post-davidsonians, as I would like to call them - can teach us a great deal about a form of mystification going on in philosophy that we can find in moral philosophy and the philosophy of language as well - not to mention what the mainstream of analytic philosophy of religion looks like. The philosophy of Bratman's gang can be studied as a warning example of the kind of thinker who has moved extremely far away from her/his subject matter, without herself noticing how far off she really is (questions about "the structure of action" - structure? Come on!).

One of the best texts we read during the course was an essay ("where the actions are") written by Frank Ebersole, a philosopher who hasn't got the attention he deserves. Maybe because his philosophy is nothing like the mainstream of analytic philosophy, nor does it have much in common with the mainstream of continental philosophy. By means of metaphors, analogies and pictures, Ebersole puts the conception that action can be stripped down to "bodily movements" in a perspective where this idea comes to appear very strange. His point is that we have a hard time coming up with a substantial picture of the kind of bodily movements-qua-actions that philosophers have had in mind. In that way, he shows that this very philosophical conception is a chimera, an impossibility. When we try to think clearly about the bodily movements which are supposed to be the "core" of action would be, the subject matter slips away and we are at a loss of what to think. (His style could, perhaps, be compared to that of O. Bouwsma - and Wittgenstein, naturally).

From Wikipedia (my, er, source of knowledge...): "Besides his intense involvement with philosophical problems, he's also a parent, a photographer, a birder, and has written two books of poetry (Many Times of Year and Song of the Crow)." How often is it pointed out, of a male philosopher, that he is a parent? Interesting. Here's a poem from one of his books - it's adorable (for lack of other words of praise). Here is Ebersole's own description of what he is up to, philosophically:

"...As quickly as I can I try to get a problem for philosophical investigation or inquiry isolated from history and from the doctrines of philosophers and get it "personalized," "internalized." Then I get to work on it -- putting to use, where they seem to apply, certain procedures and methods which I have found helpful in dealing with other problems. Among these: (a) I try always to keep the discussion in my own terms and to avoid use of the terminology of the philosophers who have dealt with the problem. I do not want to take on more of its usual philosophical baggage than is absolutely necessary to give it form as a problem. I do my best to tackle the problem as though it were the first time the problem had ever been considered; I try to think everything clean through as though none of it had been thought about before. (b) Thus, I try to avoid polemic; I try to put down the philosophical urge to array all the many philosophers before me, and to refute them one by one and declare myself the winner. I avoid constructing theories or developing dosctines. I try to stay away from the theoretical, the general and explanatory and stick to particulars, details, to cases. I want to proceed as much as possible by inventing and thinking of examples. The examples I mean, of course, are bits of stories, involving scenes or situations in which a person will properly and sensibly say something or think something. The desire to theorize, though, is often overwhelming, and when it is, there is nothing to do except to face it for what it is. I know of no effective way to do this except to confront it with more and more examples, to present it with the details -- the facts. For I know from many past experiences that these philosophical theories which rush in on me not only make me distort the facts, they make me blind to the very facts they have led me to distort. I must not let my desire to theorize turn me away from a close consideration of examples. For once my mind is full of theory, I can no longer see the determining details of an example. There is nothing to do but to be more persistent in forcing the details of examples before myself."

Frank Ebersole, Meaning and Saying, University Press of America, 1979, pages vii-viii.

"The desire to theorize is often overwhelming" - I guess that was what me & my friend wanted to convey to our students. We wanted to convey how strong that urge is, how attached one is to it, often unknowingly. Theoretical philosophy is a maze.