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Notes on contributor
Constantine Sandis is Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the author of The Things We Do and Why We Do Them (2012), Character and Causation: Hume’s Philosophy of Action (2019), and Raisons et responsabilité – Essais de philosophie de l'action (2020).
Notes
1 Dancy (Citation2018), to which all page numbers in this commentary refer, unless otherwise specified.
2 Cf. Smith and Pettit (Citation1997, 73ff.)
3 Dancy also allows for considerations to favour having a particular emotion.
4 Prichard (Citation1932, 99).
5 In his Pécis for this Book Symposium Dancy writes: “Until we solve this problem my whole story about practical reasoning is unstable […] Until we do resolve the Prichard point, we have not yet managed even to understand the notion of a reason, since we do not know what it means to talk of a consideration favouring a type of response or favouring acting in a certain way. This is not a happy situation”.
6 I use the word “particularised” rather than “particular” because I suspect that what the latter denotes, at least as I use it, is not particular enough for what Dancy has in mind. After all, you can instruct me to act in a particular way that is very precisely defined, and any number of a fixed range of particular doings would still fulfil the instruction.
7 Not least because, for Dancy and Raz alike, “in believing we are as active as we ever are” (144).
8 See Ross (Citation1930, 6–7).
9 While Dancy recognises such a distinction in the case of belief, his defence of the primacy of the practical leaves no real role for things believed to play in the theoretical case.
10 But see Dancy (Citation2009) for a detailed defence of his deflationary approach to actions.
11 Dancy (Citation2009, 401). If we must apply the type/token distinction to actions at all, I see no reason why we can’t apply it to both doings and things done. The one is not a token of the other.
12 For details see Sandis (Citation2017).
13 In a footnote, Dancy quotes the following passage from Michael Stocker, without comment: “We fulfil duties by performing … act tokens … Nonetheless it is not a duty to perform any act token. For we could have fulfilled our duty by performing another act token of the appropriate type. For example, even though that returning of the book fulfilled the promise, many other returnings of the book would have done so as well” (Stocker Citation1968, 54; as quoted in Dancy Citation2018, 31, fn.3). Yet the “act tokens” that Stocker has in mind are not acts we perform but our particular performings of them. The acts we perform, such that of returning of the book, are what Stocker (in my opinion, wrongly) conceives of as act types.
14 We would do better, I think, to talk of believing-in-action and intending-in-action.