AG Heinzelmann, 31.01.2025 An Anscombean account of doxastic agency

Some philosophers have recently suggested that belief is a somehow active phenomenon. For example, Matt Boyle writes that someone’s “believing something on a certain basis is itself an active condi­tion, the [Aristotelian] energeia of an active capacity to determine what he believes by assessing grounds for holding a given belief” (Boyle 2011, 21). And he suggests that “our discretion over our own beliefs is not extrinsic but intrinsic. On this view, we exercise our capacity for cognitive self-determination, not primarily in doing things that affect our beliefs, but in holding whatever beliefs we hold” (Boyle 2009, 127). Similar ideas have been voiced by Pamela Hieronymi, Christine Korsgaard, Richard Moran and Angela Smith, among others. They all share the thought that believing something is in some sense active, an exercise of agency. This thought strikes me as at once intuitively right and attractive, and as deeply puzzling and hard to comprehend philosophically. One puzzle it raises is how to conceive of this agency if, as everyone agrees, it is different from the kind of agency we are familiar with from the paradigm of agency, namely intentional action. I will draw on the analysis of the grammar of intentional action which G.E.M. Anscombe offers in her book Intention – a text that plays a prominent dialectical role in both Boyle’s and Hieronymi’s accounts –, and try to uncover a structurally similar yet in important respects different grammar in believing. 

Christian Kietzmann

Dr. habil. Christian Kietzmann is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. His work centers on normativity, action theory, reasoning, and anthropology, with a particular focus on Aristotle and G.E.M. Anscombe. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Basel with a dissertation on practical reasoning and has held various research positions supported by the DFG. His publications include works on practical knowledge, Aristotelian naturalism, and the philosophy of action. 

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