This chapter offers a phenomenological analysis of the intentionality of desires. It argues that desires are complex intentional states that entail both axiological and conative characters in relations of founding. By explicating the intentionality of desires, the chapter demonstrates that desires are similar to emotions as well as volitions but also differ crucially from both. Whereas emotion can lack conative components, desires always posit some goals or other, and strive for their posited goals. Unlike full-fledged volitions, however, desires entail deeply affective axiological components. The first section of the chapter provides the basic conceptual tools that are needed for a phenomenological analyses of the intentionality of desires. The second section distinguishes intentional desires from pre-intentional drives, affections, and feelings. It thereby clarifies the type of object-directedness that is characteristic of desire. The third section then explicates the axiological and conative constituents of desires in the interest of distinguishing desires from both emotions and volitions. The final section throws light on the temporality of desires. It argues that the intentionality of desires provides them with a specific “temporal shape” and makes them future-orientated. At the same time, this gives them a strong interest in realities and prospects of realization.

Isaiah Berlin argues that philosophy has a distinctive task, one which cannot be appropriated by the natural sciences. One of the reasons Berlin gives for holding that philosophy’s task falls outside the scope of science is that its area of reflection essentially employs normative concepts. An understanding of the human agent must, in the end, encompass an understanding, not only of meaning and intentional action but of the moral, political and aesthetic life of fully acculturated human beings. Although Berlin’s historical approach to this task was highly distinctive, his aims and his convictions concerning the relation between philosophy and science, the central place of the human agent in philosophy, and his anti-reductive, anti-positivist approach were shared with a number of his Oxford contemporaries, in particular G. E. M. Anscombe and P. F. Strawson. In this chapter, I look at how these three philosophers understand the nature of philosophy and the relation between philosophy and science, focusing particularly on their attitude to the topic of determinism.

There is growing awareness that pointing can take various forms, and may not be restricted to humans or other primates with arms and hands to extend. Elephants are one such animal that may use other body parts to point. African savannah (Loxodonta africana), forest (Loxodonta cyclotis) and Asian (Elephas maximums) elephants often hold their trunks in a way that looks like they are pointing, but how do we know if this is really their intention? This chapter interrogates the evidence for elephant pointing, beginning with an assessment of whether elephants can follow and understand the pointing gestures of humans. It then considers experimental and observational evidence of possible pointing in wild elephants and evaluates what would be required from this evidence to determine if elephants are using these gestures intentionally. The chapter ends by discussing possible future avenues of research that illuminate this question further.

Until recently, Wilfrid Sellars’s connection to pragmatism was seen mostly as tangential by analytic pragmatists influenced by him and by anti-analytic ‘classicalist’ pragmatists alike. Recent scholarship in the history of pragmatism, however, has begun to recover him as a genuine member of that tradition. Similarly, John Dewey, whom no one would challenge as a genuine pragmatist, is often seen by classicalists as fundamentally opposed to the kind of analytic philosophy that Sellars represents and by analytic pragmatists as having some good ideas but not very successfully bringing them to fruition. This too is conventional wisdom best overturned. A fresh-eyed interpretation of Dewey’s work shows that Dewey is a major influence on the development of Sellars’s pragmatism, namely that Sellars’s account of conceptual intentionality in nature is both a critical reaction to and development of Dewey’s naturalistic view of conceptual meanings. In particular, Sellars’s account of rule-following behavior and pattern-governed behavior builds upon Dewey’s account of the relationship between conceptual activity in reasoned discourse and intelligent habits of action in ordinary affairs. By illuminating this influence of Dewey on Sellars, we see that Sellars and Dewey are in the same pragmatist tradition of thought about mind in nature. Further, appreciating this influence shows that Sellars’ view departs from an important tenet of Dewey’s pragmatism, and in doing so makes his view vulnerable to an objection that Dewey’s is not.

Chapter 26 discusses in more detail the concepts innate in the soul whereby soul can reason about what transcends reasoning. I describe the relations between words, concepts and things (in this case transcendent realities), as the later Platonists saw these relations, and argue that the rational soul does not simple ‘look’ at metaphysical concepts, as it were, but that they are known as part of the dynamic, productive operations of rational thought.

This chapter has been designed to help you learn about: how others plan for play-based learning and intentionality in the The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (V2.0); what a Conceptual PlayWorld looks like for three groups – infants and toddlers, preschoolers, and children transitioning to school; how to design a Conceptual PlayWorld to support cultural competence; and how to plan a Conceptual PlayWorld for a range of educational settings.

The theory posits that conformation systems are the channel for children to discover their community’s implementations of each relational model. Hence, children seek, initiate, attend, and take note of conformations. Consequently, conformation systems are the media for cultural reproduction, transformation, and resistance to social systems. Another point to consider is that conformations may or may not be intentional, be done by choice, or be in conscious awareness. Also a big issue is the conceptualization of felicity conditions for conformations: When are people receptive to a given conformation, and when are they offended by – and reject – a given conformation? Another aspect of conformation systems that we have only touched on, but that merits extensive research, is that they, on the one hand, often depend on available technology, and, on the other hand, impel the invention, diffusion, and development of technologies that facilitate, amplify, and hence increase the efficacy of conformations.

This chapter will examine how intentionality shapes the intimate life of people affected by narcissistic traits. Focusing on the notion of interaffectivity, the chapter will discuss the affectivity of people suffering from narcissistic traits through the lenses of passive, active and practical intentionality as expounded in Husserl’s work. I believe that the clarification of the narcissistic wound and its impact on the interaffective dynamics of daily life might help rehabilitation to a healthier life. Removing the “intentional blockage” that prevents them from exploring the content of their lived-experience would restore an interaffective space conducive to a more flourishing intimate life with their loved ones.

Kneer and Bourgeois-Gironde (2017) reported that legal experts’ intentionality ascriptions are susceptible to the “severity effect” (i.e., influenced by differently harmful side effects), which violates the outcome-independent legal concept of intentionality prevalent in many criminal law systems. This challenges the “legal expertise defense” (= legal experts are more competent users of legal concepts and their legal judgments are more reliable than those of laypeople). Prochownik, Krebs, Wiegmann, and Horvath (2020) hypothesized that the “severity effect” might be due to confounding features of the previously used vignettes (i.e., the somewhat bad cases not being perceived as harmful by legal experts). They created new stimuli with clear cases of harm that differed in the degree of harm across two conditions, and they did not observe any “severity effect” in legal experts or laypeople. Yet, the difference in harm ratings across conditions was not very large. The current study addresses this limitation: Even after increasing the difference in the perceived degree of harm, we still do not observe the “severity effect” in legal experts or laypeople.

Chapter 7 queries how the law addresses evolving concepts such as intentionality, intersectionality, and multiracial identities. In a common law system, legal precedents are static even though public understanding of race in society has expanded dramatically. This chapter explores the historic requirement to demonstrate evidence of an intent to discriminate to justify intervention by the law, which emerged from a traditional understanding of racism as personal and purposeful. Despite the potential harm of neutral policies creating disparate damages in racialized communities, this barrier to governmental action and its concomitant justification for neglect, matters. Students will explore the inability of the law to address multiple racial identities simultaneously and the legal consequences of ignoring intersectionality. The text considers a proposed constitutional amendment to address this limitation. Finally, the law’s hesitance to address multiracial identities is explored, questioning whether current legal structure is adequate to address contemporary understandings of racism and racial discrimination.

Various areas in psychology are interested in whether specific processes underlying judgments and behavior operate in an automatic or nonautomatic fashion. In social psychology, valuable insights can be gained from evidence on whether and how judgments and behavior under suboptimal processing conditions differ from judgments and behavior under optimal processing conditions. In personality psychology, valuable insights can be gained from individual differences in behavioral tendencies under optimal and suboptimal processing conditions. The current chapter provides a method-focused overview of different features of automaticity (e.g., unintentionality, efficiency, uncontrollability, unconsciousness), how these features can be studied empirically, and pragmatic issues in research on automaticity. Expanding on this overview, the chapter describes the procedures of extant implicit measures and the value of implicit measures for studying automatic processes in judgments and behavior. The chapter concludes with a discussion of pragmatic issues in research using implicit measures.

Despite R. G. Collingwood’s relation to British Idealism, a close reading of his subtle descriptions of imagination and expression reveals important points of contact with the phenomenological tradition. In the first section, I bring together Collingwood’s exploration of the role of imagination in art with Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of intentionality and expression. This provides insights into both thinkers’ attempts to describe lived experience and action, highlighting important aspects of their work overlooked by readers. In the second section, I explore how Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty both describe communication as an open and evolving movement of understanding that does not fall back upon a supposedly isolated consciousnesses, thereby eluding the threat of solipsism. In the third section, I outline the connection between Husserl’s identification of a “crisis” in the European sciences and Collingwood’s invocation against what he calls the “corruption of consciousness,” a particularly modern shirking of our responsibilities as expressive and active members of the community.