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This chapter builds upon the preceding account of complex causal processes by considering step-by-step the increasing abilities of organisms to respond to information about their environments in increasingly flexible ways, and the neural processes that make this flexibility possible. The characteristics of goal-directedness and evaluation are present in even the most rudimentary biological activity; the distinctiveness of intelligent action lies in the organism's ability to detach itself from immediate biological and environmental stimuli, and in the character of the evaluative processes involved. Such evaluation depends on hierarchical structuring of cognitive processes such that higher animals are able to make their own actions (and in the case of humans, their own cognition) the product of evaluation. The nature of consciousness in evaluative processes is also discussed.

The deeper and more wide-ranging one's reflections about love are, the clearer it becomes that it is not definable. The directedness that is felt and sought in love is revealed in the very impossibility of defining it through nondirectedness. Although the will is the starting point of every reflection about love, it leads only to the borders, so that it should be testified there that they, those limits of the definable, confirm the nonexisting as fullness. The will sets out from the illusion that forms the human standpoint and endeavors to transform it into something higher and different. But that transformation is an ascent to standlessness, or the openness of the heart to fullness and uprightness. Since God is beautiful and since He loves beauty, He reveals Himself as beauty to the one who knows the world. The face of man is opposite the Face of God. And God is oneness. He sees Himself in that human face and therefore descends to full closeness.

This chapter introduces the four main themes of the book: 1.1 The Origin and Status of Laws of Nature. Canvassing the contemporary literature, this section shows just how differently early modern thinkers conceived of laws of nature. Descartes transfers a notion from divine command theory to the physical realm, and it retains some of the features of its ancestor. In particular, Descartes's notion still implies that the law is determined by a lawgiver, and not by its subjects. 1.2 The Ontology of Powers. Many figures still wish to retain the bottom‐up conception, however. To do this, they had to resurrect the core scholastic notion Descartes jettisons: power. Régis, Locke, and Boyle all seek to recast this notion in mechanistic terms. 1.3 Necessity. The argument here is that scholastic views take causation to be logical necessitation, and that modern philosophy never really breaks free from this analysis. 1.4 Models of Causation. Confronted with the mechanist ontology, the scholastic notion of power splits in two: a cognitive model, which locates causal power in the intentional states of a divine mind, and a geometrical model, which accounts for the directedness of causal powers in terms of the mechanical properties of bodies.

This chapter attempts to answer the question, ‘What is there?’, by going one step up the ladder of abstraction. To investigate the metaphysical context of causal powers, the chapter suggests three ontologically fundamental categories — objects, properties, and relations — which are fundamental because entities falling into these categories are necessary and sufficient for all truths about the world. The chapter discusses in detail objects as bundles of properties, foundationism and relations, and the status of states of affairs. An introduction to the theory of powers is given at the end. The chapter presents the basic features of powers, which are directedness, independence, actuality, intrinsicality, and objectivity.

This chapter explains an essential feature of power properties: directedness, which provides a direction to a particular manifestation. The chapter contends that the connection between power and manifestation is a difficult but necessary task for the theory of powers. It evaluates the strengths and faults of the Brentano thesis, and analyses the topic of intentionality, which includes the parallels between psychological intentionality and physical intentionality. The chapter also provides accounts of the objections to physical intentionality, including impossible intentional objects, the threat of panpsychism, unique intentional objects, and the deluge of necessities. Lastly, the chapter proposes to treat physical intentionality as an undefined primitive of the theory of properties.

A class border threads through many of the narratives explored in the present study, with the texts frequently mapping ‘voyages to the land of the people’. Alongside this, the relationship between social representation and the expressive function is often prominent, as the word composition in Michon, Ndiaye, Simon, and Péguy strikingly illustrates. This may be tied in with Rancière’s argument about ‘the word at large that anyone can grab hold of’. Yet his notion of the ‘democracy of literature’ notwithstanding, the texts that are explored risk conveying at a thematic level an absence of social directedness and consequence. Many of them, indeed, represent cycles of entrenched containment: the pre-1914 world depicted in Proust, Péguy, Nizan, and Simon; the lives of industrial workers in the 1930s as explored by Weil; the peasant lives which Michon retrieves; working-class communities in France’s Fifth Republic as evoked by Ndiaye and Eribon and held within society’s ‘verdict’; the status of the workplace in a post-industrial age as charted by Bon and Beinstingel. Yet these texts also carry interventions (social, linguistic, thematic, intermedial) that hold a power of contestation. They channel ‘transformations of the sensible fabric’, to use Rancière’s formulation, that carry an emancipatory potential.

Inspired by Kurt Lewin's (1935) field theory, social psychologists have sought to demonstrate that a wide range of human behavior, socially desirable as well as undesirable, is under the control of immediate situational forces. Indeed, the field of social psychology has been defined as the study of situational determinants of thought, feeling, and action. Research on automaticity has provided a new impetus to the study of situational control over behavior. This research suggests that situational cues can govern behavior without being consciously processed and without making a deliberate choice of an appropriate course of action. Short-term motives, especially those that are automatically triggered by the immediate stimulus situation, may prevent people from pursuing their long-term goals. This chapter examines how people protect their long-term goals against temporary, situationally elicited motives and proposes that when short-term motives threaten the attainment of long-term goals, people proactively employ counteractive self-control strategies—strategies that are designed to offset the influence of short-term motives on behavior. Evidence lends support for the goal-directedness assumption of counteractive control.

This chapter discusses a phenomenologically grounded approach to willing based on Henri Burgson, Paul Ricoeur, and Alfred Schutz's writings. It claims that this approach to willing can have a significant impact in informing anthropological theorizing and research, due to the assumptions related to a number of distinct phenomenal aspects of willing. It also proposes three experiential correlates of willing: sense of own-ness, anticipation/goal directedness, and effortful-ness.

Chapter 5 does two things: it clarifies the features of world-involving but contentless Ur-intentionality and how this fundamental form of intentionality can be understood naturalistically. It explains how it is possible to make sense of REC’s proposal that basic minds are contentless while nonetheless holding on to the claim that such minds exhibit a kind of basic intentionality. It does so by situating REC’s notion of Ur-intentionality within the larger history of attempts to explicate the notion of intentionality simpliciter, showing that there is conceptual space for and reason to believe in a nonrepresentational form of intentionality. The second part of the chapter provides a fresh analysis of how and why this most basic kind of intentionality can be best accounted for in naturalistic terms by means of a RECtified teleosemantics—one stripped of problematic semantic ambitions and put to different theoretical use, namely, that of explicating the most basic, nonsemantic forms of world-involving cognition.

This chapter deals with the continuation of important efforts to reduce shame and shaming, particularly in American society over the past half century. But it also notes important and unexpected countercurrents, ranging from shame-based punishments from some American courts to the wide use of shaming in partisanship and on social media.

This chapter begins with a presentation of Frege’s reflections on the concept of sense and how it has been misread as leading to a philosophy based on psychologism. This is helpful because the focus of this chapter is based on the psychological—specifically, conscious experiences defined by there being something it is like to have them. An extended account of states that are both conscious and intentional is also discussed, claiming that the intentional directedness of experiences consists in disclosing activity, and that this disclosing activity typically involves neural processes, bodily processes, and things done in and to the world. This intentional directedness is used to argue the point for an extended model of conscious experience.

What are the neuronal mechanisms underlying intentionality? Recent findings show a neural activity balance between the midline network and the lateral cortical network. Both networks are “anticorrelated” with each other in their degree of neural activity and functional connectivity. Moreover, it has been shown that the two neural networks are associated with distinct forms of awareness: internal awareness targeting internal contents is associated with the midline network, while external awareness directed toward external content is related to neural activity in the lateral network.

Chapter 1 argues for a teleological account of dispositions. According to this account of dispositions, the connection between dispositions and conditionals is explained in terms of the directedness of dispositions and the directedness of dispositions is a teleological directedness.

Nick Kroll’s Teleological Approach to Dispositions (TAD) promises to explain the sense in which dispositions are directed at manifesting. However, Kroll’s explanation of directedness is problematic for a number of reasons. First, TAD depends on a distinction between a disposition being stimulated and it being “activated,” but Kroll’s obscure notion of activation seems incapable of solving the problems for which it was introduced. Second, TAD does not attribute directedness to the disposition itself, but to a distinct state of the disposed object. Third, TAD either implies the implausible view that a disposed object is in a state directed at having its disposition stimulated, or it does not account for a disposition’s directedness when it is not in stimulating circumstances. Finally, if TAD does give us directedness, it is liable to give too much, for it is likely to entail that everything is constantly directed in innumerably many different directions.

In “Teleological Dispositions,” Nick Kroll suggests that a primitive notion of directedness can provide a theory of dispositions, an explanation of the link between dispositions and conditionals, and an account of the progressive aspect in English. This paper raises some worries for each of these claims.

This chapter demonstrates that the relationship between vocation and virtue is not limited to the ancient world, but can be expanded and employed in the contemporary setting as well. It makes use of the work of Josiah Royce, whose writings on “the philosophy of loyalty” provide the raw material for a consideration of character and the good life, particularly with respect to undergraduate education. The chapter suggests that the culture that many students inhabit—often framed by the categories of individualism, independence from external authority, self-focus, and moments of crisis—offers particularly fertile ground for the language of loyalty. This language has an initial appeal to student concerns, but it helps to shift the focus, suggesting that their concerns can also be addressed through attention to community, shared authority, attention to the other, and a broadening of perspective.

This chapter begins with a brief historical sketch of the role of “community service” and “service learning” on college campuses, followed by an account of its evolution into “community engagement” and a consideration of the difference this change in terminology makes. The wider community offers an important site for the listening, reflection, and active experimentation that marks the process of vocational discernment. Still, this process must be undertaken with care so that it has a positive impact on both the participating students and the surrounding community. At its best, community engagement engenders precisely the kinds of character development we most want higher education to instill—giving genuine attention to the other, questioning assumptions about individualism and success, and developing resilience in the face of failure—while offering undergraduates the time and space they need to reflect on vocation.

The chapter centres on Hobbes’ radical project in action theory, which has dominated English-language action theory since—of identifying action and its purposiveness with voluntariness. To do something as a means to an end is to do it on the basis of a will to do it, and so as an effect of passive pro attitudes towards doing it. The chapter discusses the implications of this model, and the peculiar difficulties it poses, very much pressed by Hobbes himself, for the intuition that, though non-voluntary, decisions to act are themselves goal-directed actions—deliberately taken for the purpose of ensuring performance of the action decided upon.

This chapter, drawing on the work of Bernard Williams, Terence Irwin, and Julia Annas, considers six conditions standardly taken to be crucial to morality: preference-independence (moral principles apply independently of one’s preferences), supremacy or what some call “moral overridingness” (moral reasons trump non-moral reasons), equality, other-directedness, locus (the “locus” of morality is intention, not actual success), and completion (all moral value lies in motivation), plus one condition—taste—not ordinarily taken to be a part of a morally virtuous character. He then argues that Aristotle’s idea of character excellence lacks distinguishing features that morality possesses (e.g., the idea of equality), while it includes features that are not part of morality according to contemporary views, such as taste. He concludes that Aristotle’s conception of character excellence is not a conception of moral character excellence.

In this chapter, one of his last papers, Loar brings together all the major themes of his work on phenomenal intentionality. He mounts a grand defense for the idea that in addition to referential content, thought has a content that is narrow, and non-referential. To show this, he introduces, among others, an argument from the brain-in-a-vat scenario. And he provides an answer to the question that has been to some degree up in the air in previous chapters: in what does narrow content consist? Building on his theme of the narrow intentionality of perceptual experience, he locates the origins of narrow intentionality for thought in phenomenal features of perceptual experience. The key idea is that the narrow content of perceptions and thoughts consists in their directedness, in their purporting to refer. This directedness is a phenomenal feature that is shared between me and my envatted-brain twin.