1. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics — though the standard translations do not use ‘intending’ as opposed, e.g., to ‘desiderativedesire’; Thomas Aquinas’s Summa; in many modern philosophers, including Bentham, who is famous for his distinction between direct and oblique intentions, and Mill; and, in the Twentieth Century, a long line of writers beginning with G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956).
2. In “Intending,” Journal of Philosophy LXX (1973).
3. For defense of one or another element in my account (but not the whole of it) see, e.g., Raimo Tuomela, Human Action and Its Explanation (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1977) and Wayne A. Davis, “A Causal Theory of Intending,” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984); and for some of my replies to critics, e.g., H. J. McCann, A. R. Mele, and J. L. A. Garcia, and extensions of the account see my “Wants and Intentions in the Explanation of Action,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 9 (1980); “Intending, Intentional Action, and Desire,” in Joel E. Marks, ed., The Ways of Desire (Chicago: Precedent Publishing Company, 1986); “Deliberative Intentions and Willingness to Act: A Reply to Professor Mele,” Philosophia 18 (1988); and “Intention, Cognitive Commitment, and Planning,” Synthese 86 (1991).
4. This is the account I offered in Audi (1973). The variables have been altered. Only minor, stylistic changes have been made, such as alteration in the variables in the original account. I would now make explicit something only suggested in that paper: the agent need only believe at least that the action is probable — we need a disjunction of beliefs here not a disjunctive belief
5. In this context have in mind intentionally causing oneself to form an intention, not doing this in the way one does when, say by breaking a glass, one causes oneself to form an intention to clean up the fragments. One way to see that (intentionally) causing oneself to form an intention is different from simply forming one is to note how the former typically occurs: in artificial cases, as where one is paid to form a certain intention, such as to stand on one’s head, hence takes a pill to produce it in oneself. Here one might have a reason to cause oneself to form the intention (that it will pay one) that is not a reason to A. But typically a reason for forming an intention to A is also a reason to A, for instance where it is in one’s interest to A tomorrow, and one cannot A then without both forming the intention, now, to do so and making the preliminary steps one takes A-ing to require.