Desire

Abstract

There is a natural contrast often made in ordinary language between the actions which we do because we want or desire to do them, and the actions which we do although we do not want to do them. It is a contrast which has been ignored by much modern philosophy of mind which has seen desire as a component of all actions, and the reasons for all actions as involving desires of various kinds. The ignoring of the distinction between desire and the active component in every action (call it ‘trying’ or ‘seeking’ or ‘having a volition’) leads a man to suppose that he can no more help doing what he does than he can help his desires. But ‘desires’, in the normal ordinary language sense of the word, are natural inclinations to actions of certain sorts with which we find ourselves. We cannot (immediately) help our natural inclinations but what we can do is choose whether to yield to them, or resist them and do what we are not naturally inclined to do.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 44 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.