Abstract

This book is a development of ideas originally set out in the author’s well known articles "Basic Actions" and "What We can Do." The announced aim of the book is to isolate a class of actions that are basic in the sense that we do not do them by doing some other action. As Danto expresses it in the preface, he wants to "wash away the contextual features which convert movements into gestures and vest the disposition of limbs with high spiritual significance." Danto compares doing this to eliminating the conceptual or interpretative component of perception so as to leave a purely sensory component. Indeed, the main strategy of this book is to exploit the analogies he sees between knowings and doings: as there are basic actions, so there are basic cognitions, things we know without having to know something else; and as there are things we know only by knowing other things which are evidence for them, so there are things we do only by doing other things which are adequate to cause them. There is also analogy in that descriptions of actions, like ascriptions of knowledge, are intensional—in Danto’s phrase, they have a complex logical structure arising from the fact that they are at once about the world and about somebody’s representation of the world. The things in the world which the descriptions of basic actions are about are physical movements subject to the causal order and identified by their place in this order, but the fact that descriptions of them as actions are intensional means that they also somehow transcend the causal order, and are free. So man, by acting, as by knowing, has a foot in both the physical and spiritual realms.—M.H.