Intention and Identity: Introduction
John M. Finnis, INTENTION AND IDENTITY: COLLECTED ESSAYS VOLUME II, Oxford: OUP, 2011
17 Pages Posted: 30 May 2011 Last revised: 21 Aug 2011
Date Written: May 23, 2011
Abstract
This Introduction to my Intention and Identity: Collected Essays Volume II (Oxford University Press 2011), published in the United Kingdom in early April, and in the United States in early May 2011, introduces the volume’s 19 published and unpublished essays, and follows the volume’s division into four Parts: Nature and Freedom in Personal Identity; Group Identity and Group Acts; Acts and Intentions; and Persons Beginning and Dying. The first two-thirds of the Introduction is, in effect, a brief new essay on deliberating towards choice and action, with a focus on the reality of intention and on the commonplace but remarkable reality of spirit and the consequent freedom we have, as persons, in choosing. The relation between intending an meaning is also discussed, as is the reality of spirit as an at least radical capacity even in those human persons who are very undeveloped or are severely injured or decrepit. The Introduction, like the volume, intersects with the Introductions to, and contents of, the other volumes in the five-volume set, which is published just before the second edition of Natural Law and Natural Rights, reformatted to accompany the set and incorporating a 65-page Postscript. The Collected Essays are I Reason in Action, II Intention and Identity, III Human Rights and Common Good, IV Philosophy of Law, V Religion and Public Reasons. Each volume includes the index for the set, and the author’s bibliography.
Keywords: philosophy of law, moral and political philosophy, theology, religious ethics, catholic church
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