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Action, Emotion, and Will
Action, Emotion and Will was first published in 1963, when it was one of the first books to provoke serious interest in the emotions and philosophy of human action. Almost forty years on, Anthony Kenny's account of action and emotion is still essential reading for anyone interested in these topics.
The first part of the book takes an historical look at the emotions in the work of Descartes, Locke and particularly Hume. In the second part, Kenny moves onto discuss some of the experimental work on the emotions by 20th Century psychologists like William James. Separate chapters cover feelings, motives, desire and pleasure. This edition features a brand new preface by the author.
The first part of the book takes an historical look at the emotions in the work of Descartes, Locke and particularly Hume. In the second part, Kenny moves onto discuss some of the experimental work on the emotions by 20th Century psychologists like William James. Separate chapters cover feelings, motives, desire and pleasure. This edition features a brand new preface by the author.
253 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1963
About the author
Anthony Kenny
169 books124 followersSir Anthony Kenny is an English philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of religion.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 12, 2023
I came to this book because it is recognized as the first treatment of emotion in the tradition of contemporary analytic philosophy. I was hoping to gain new insights into the nature of emotion or action. I only learned two things from this work: (1) Some of the history of Descartres' philosophizing about emotion, and (2) How interesting and strange it is to see an inquiry into a philosophical issue so very influenced by trends of kinds of questions to ask and of methodologies of the time of the author's writing.
Kenny writes in a plodding, overly expansive way. His arguments and points are simple, but he takes pages upon pages to give examples and to re-frame the issue at hand under theoretical angles that were popular at his time, but which do not add actual argumentative or explanatory force. I think the points he covers that are truthful are more interestingly and deeply treated by Anscombe (e.g., in her book Intention and her paper "The Intentionality of Sensation"). Anscombe makes more insightful observations about the topics treated by Kenny, and she also has more admirable arguments.
Let me summarize some points in Kenny's work. He opens the book with stating his starting point, which sounds promising: Much of philosophy of mind, and philosophical understanding of basic folk psychological concepts (e.g., emotion, action), is driven by concerns for addressing questions in epistemology. This has hindered philosophy of mind. I found the first chapter the only chapter that was worth reading in its entirety. There, Kenny goes into the views of Descartes, Hume, and William James on emotion. Descartes thought our knowledge of our emotions is epistemically infallible, because there is no content of emotion that is there for us to know about; emotion is rather on par with a bodily sensation. It's only that emotion often comes together with our having thoughts about our situation, which are epistemically fallible. Descartes set up the history of Western philosophy, according to Kenny, to think that the significant questions to ask about emotion regard the identification of the causal mechanisms that generate emotion. This in effect is a rhetorical move, for Kenny to later introduce his intervention into how philosophers should think about emotion: there are significant questions to be asked about the very structure of emotion, and Kenny will show that emotion has a logical structure akin to that of action, in taking on an intentional object.
Kenny thinks that Hume improved upon Descartes' view by introducing the distinction between the object that causes an emotion, and the object towards which an emotion is directed. But Hume had no systematic grasp of this distinction, according to Kenny, and moreover, treats the object which an emotion is about as a contingent feature of emotion, agreeing in effect with Descartes that only that there is some cause of an emotion is a necessary feature of it.
In chapter 2, Kenny goes over the history of experimental psychology's treatment of emotion (from his standpoint of writing in the 1950's - there has been much innovation in psychology since then, which I'll elaborate a bit more on below). There were interesting facts listed here. Kenny's main point is that these psychologists (the early ones were all 'introspectionists,' thinking that the key method of discovering facts about the mind is to be trained in first-person noticing and describing features of experience) inherit Descartes' assumption that first-person thought is infallible. Kenny criticizes this, from his position of the recent shift in the philosophical landscape by late Wittgenstein and his private language argument. Then behaviorism comes around, which is misguided for its own reasons. Kenny goes at great lengths presenting arguments against these positions on emotion, which seem unnecessary from our contemporary standpoint, where it's obvious why behaviorism and total reliance upon introspection alike fail.
In chapter 3, Kenny examines the psychological concept of feeling. He analyzes how the verb "to feel" operates in ordinary language. He takes various grammatical features it displays as reasons for attributing to feeling certain properties: it has similarities to emotion and perception but isn't quite identical to other (emotion need not be located on the body, whereas feeling does; perception must be about the world, whereas feeling need not be). Moreover, the causes for a feeling are usually mechanistic or a-rational, whereas the causes cited for an emotion often are described in rational or normatively assessable terms. Kenny argues that in contrast to feeling, emotion is necessary directed towards some object, even if it seems that we can point to counterexamples. (I'll revisit and address this point below).
In chapters 4, 5, and 6, Kenny treats the concepts of motive, desire, and pleasure, respectively. I found these discussions generally uninteresting. They all fall under the pattern of Kenny identifying how these concepts are used in ordinary language, and then uses these grammatical points as reasons for making certain claims about these psychological entities. But I got the impression that, in reality, Kenny first believed in the truth of these claims (they are all relatively intuitive and commonsense), and then ad-hoc found arguments for them, by "reading into" grammatical features of their relevant concepts.
In chapters 7-11 Kenny treats the concept of action. My reasons for dissatisfaction of his manner of proceeding named above apply here.
As a whole, Kenny is known for showing that emotion must have an intentional object. He makes some good arguments for this point in chapters 10 and 11, by showing parallels between how emotion terms operate in sentences and how action verbs do. Maybe this is just my idiosyncratic taste, but I find arguments for the intentionality of emotion based in evolutionary considerations and comparative psychology more convincing (e.g., emotion is there as to indicate to an animal that something significant is happening in its environment; so emotion is necessarily connected up to the world as sensed by the animal). Moreover, I find that the more interesting questions to ask about emotion concern the nature of this intentional object or aspect of emotion. Through what means do we apprehend it - perception, thought, imagination, memory, etc.? Need it be a particular object or state of affairs we have in mind, or could it be relatively indeterminate (satisfying some general description of certain sensory features)? Could it change over time? (I can't blame Kenny for not addressing these questions, for they just fall outside of his scope - maybe this is a virtue of his book, its provoking further thought.)
I admit that it is very much possible that Kenny's work is more significant than I can appreciate; maybe before this, philosophers really thought of emotion in non-intentional terms. At least Kenny establishes that the cause of emotion must be distinguished from its intentional object, and that both are necessary to emotion. This is an important point for any thinker on emotion.
A side note: it’s interesting to see how at Kenny's time and place, the obsession with the question of whether there are any private mental events (as understood under the context of late-Wittgensteinian discussions on this matter) strongly influenced the style of reasoning and questioning philosophers had at his time. It's also interesting to think about: What's really was at stake with this concern? How was it abused? I'm not familiar with late-Wittgensteinian debates on this matter, so here are only my reactive or preliminary thoughts. It seems to me that what’s at stake is whether our seemingly private thoughts could have no causal dependence upon social norms and influence or not. It seems that they cannot. But this is different from the question of whether we can have mental actions that no one could ever see, which just change our inner state and have no manifestation in observable behavior.
It seems that Kenny has the two issues confused. Throughout the book, he insists that all features of emotion states that might at first seem private must have some behavioral manifestation. Moreover, many of his arguments circle around this assumption. It's of methodological interest to me to see this. It makes me wonder, what obsessions control the intellectual landscape today in philosophy, which might be abused or have undue influence?
A last point: for readers interested in emotion, I think the most compelling treatments of emotion are found in contemporary theoretical and experimental psychology, which often goes under the heading of the "appraisal theory of emotion." Psychologists examine emotion in functional terms, so they do not address the question of the nature of the intentional object of emotion head-on. I think this is, methodologically, a virtue. In reading their work, it can become evident to one various features that must hold of that of which we're aware when having emotion, which might be described as the intentional object or that which the emotion is about. But we don't have to put labels on these features of emotion, which allow us to form hypotheses about emotion that might imply claims that stand in tension with those implied by ascribing to emotion an "intentional object" (e.g., the latter implies that there is a particular thing that we're conscious of; but without using this term, we're welcomed to questions regarding what it means at all to be conscious of something, of whether this can come in different shades and varieties; also, we're welcomed to questions regarding what it means for our emotion to be directed towards or about something - maybe sometimes in the moment of emotion there's no clear distinction between the cause and intentional object, because we aren't focally aware of any particular, or of our being in an emotion state; but rather only after the fact does this distinction become relevant, when we explain or make sense of an emotion experience).
Kenny writes in a plodding, overly expansive way. His arguments and points are simple, but he takes pages upon pages to give examples and to re-frame the issue at hand under theoretical angles that were popular at his time, but which do not add actual argumentative or explanatory force. I think the points he covers that are truthful are more interestingly and deeply treated by Anscombe (e.g., in her book Intention and her paper "The Intentionality of Sensation"). Anscombe makes more insightful observations about the topics treated by Kenny, and she also has more admirable arguments.
Let me summarize some points in Kenny's work. He opens the book with stating his starting point, which sounds promising: Much of philosophy of mind, and philosophical understanding of basic folk psychological concepts (e.g., emotion, action), is driven by concerns for addressing questions in epistemology. This has hindered philosophy of mind. I found the first chapter the only chapter that was worth reading in its entirety. There, Kenny goes into the views of Descartes, Hume, and William James on emotion. Descartes thought our knowledge of our emotions is epistemically infallible, because there is no content of emotion that is there for us to know about; emotion is rather on par with a bodily sensation. It's only that emotion often comes together with our having thoughts about our situation, which are epistemically fallible. Descartes set up the history of Western philosophy, according to Kenny, to think that the significant questions to ask about emotion regard the identification of the causal mechanisms that generate emotion. This in effect is a rhetorical move, for Kenny to later introduce his intervention into how philosophers should think about emotion: there are significant questions to be asked about the very structure of emotion, and Kenny will show that emotion has a logical structure akin to that of action, in taking on an intentional object.
Kenny thinks that Hume improved upon Descartes' view by introducing the distinction between the object that causes an emotion, and the object towards which an emotion is directed. But Hume had no systematic grasp of this distinction, according to Kenny, and moreover, treats the object which an emotion is about as a contingent feature of emotion, agreeing in effect with Descartes that only that there is some cause of an emotion is a necessary feature of it.
In chapter 2, Kenny goes over the history of experimental psychology's treatment of emotion (from his standpoint of writing in the 1950's - there has been much innovation in psychology since then, which I'll elaborate a bit more on below). There were interesting facts listed here. Kenny's main point is that these psychologists (the early ones were all 'introspectionists,' thinking that the key method of discovering facts about the mind is to be trained in first-person noticing and describing features of experience) inherit Descartes' assumption that first-person thought is infallible. Kenny criticizes this, from his position of the recent shift in the philosophical landscape by late Wittgenstein and his private language argument. Then behaviorism comes around, which is misguided for its own reasons. Kenny goes at great lengths presenting arguments against these positions on emotion, which seem unnecessary from our contemporary standpoint, where it's obvious why behaviorism and total reliance upon introspection alike fail.
In chapter 3, Kenny examines the psychological concept of feeling. He analyzes how the verb "to feel" operates in ordinary language. He takes various grammatical features it displays as reasons for attributing to feeling certain properties: it has similarities to emotion and perception but isn't quite identical to other (emotion need not be located on the body, whereas feeling does; perception must be about the world, whereas feeling need not be). Moreover, the causes for a feeling are usually mechanistic or a-rational, whereas the causes cited for an emotion often are described in rational or normatively assessable terms. Kenny argues that in contrast to feeling, emotion is necessary directed towards some object, even if it seems that we can point to counterexamples. (I'll revisit and address this point below).
In chapters 4, 5, and 6, Kenny treats the concepts of motive, desire, and pleasure, respectively. I found these discussions generally uninteresting. They all fall under the pattern of Kenny identifying how these concepts are used in ordinary language, and then uses these grammatical points as reasons for making certain claims about these psychological entities. But I got the impression that, in reality, Kenny first believed in the truth of these claims (they are all relatively intuitive and commonsense), and then ad-hoc found arguments for them, by "reading into" grammatical features of their relevant concepts.
In chapters 7-11 Kenny treats the concept of action. My reasons for dissatisfaction of his manner of proceeding named above apply here.
As a whole, Kenny is known for showing that emotion must have an intentional object. He makes some good arguments for this point in chapters 10 and 11, by showing parallels between how emotion terms operate in sentences and how action verbs do. Maybe this is just my idiosyncratic taste, but I find arguments for the intentionality of emotion based in evolutionary considerations and comparative psychology more convincing (e.g., emotion is there as to indicate to an animal that something significant is happening in its environment; so emotion is necessarily connected up to the world as sensed by the animal). Moreover, I find that the more interesting questions to ask about emotion concern the nature of this intentional object or aspect of emotion. Through what means do we apprehend it - perception, thought, imagination, memory, etc.? Need it be a particular object or state of affairs we have in mind, or could it be relatively indeterminate (satisfying some general description of certain sensory features)? Could it change over time? (I can't blame Kenny for not addressing these questions, for they just fall outside of his scope - maybe this is a virtue of his book, its provoking further thought.)
I admit that it is very much possible that Kenny's work is more significant than I can appreciate; maybe before this, philosophers really thought of emotion in non-intentional terms. At least Kenny establishes that the cause of emotion must be distinguished from its intentional object, and that both are necessary to emotion. This is an important point for any thinker on emotion.
A side note: it’s interesting to see how at Kenny's time and place, the obsession with the question of whether there are any private mental events (as understood under the context of late-Wittgensteinian discussions on this matter) strongly influenced the style of reasoning and questioning philosophers had at his time. It's also interesting to think about: What's really was at stake with this concern? How was it abused? I'm not familiar with late-Wittgensteinian debates on this matter, so here are only my reactive or preliminary thoughts. It seems to me that what’s at stake is whether our seemingly private thoughts could have no causal dependence upon social norms and influence or not. It seems that they cannot. But this is different from the question of whether we can have mental actions that no one could ever see, which just change our inner state and have no manifestation in observable behavior.
It seems that Kenny has the two issues confused. Throughout the book, he insists that all features of emotion states that might at first seem private must have some behavioral manifestation. Moreover, many of his arguments circle around this assumption. It's of methodological interest to me to see this. It makes me wonder, what obsessions control the intellectual landscape today in philosophy, which might be abused or have undue influence?
A last point: for readers interested in emotion, I think the most compelling treatments of emotion are found in contemporary theoretical and experimental psychology, which often goes under the heading of the "appraisal theory of emotion." Psychologists examine emotion in functional terms, so they do not address the question of the nature of the intentional object of emotion head-on. I think this is, methodologically, a virtue. In reading their work, it can become evident to one various features that must hold of that of which we're aware when having emotion, which might be described as the intentional object or that which the emotion is about. But we don't have to put labels on these features of emotion, which allow us to form hypotheses about emotion that might imply claims that stand in tension with those implied by ascribing to emotion an "intentional object" (e.g., the latter implies that there is a particular thing that we're conscious of; but without using this term, we're welcomed to questions regarding what it means at all to be conscious of something, of whether this can come in different shades and varieties; also, we're welcomed to questions regarding what it means for our emotion to be directed towards or about something - maybe sometimes in the moment of emotion there's no clear distinction between the cause and intentional object, because we aren't focally aware of any particular, or of our being in an emotion state; but rather only after the fact does this distinction become relevant, when we explain or make sense of an emotion experience).
May 18, 2025
June 2026:
Understood a lot more of the book than the first time around. The subtlety of analysis here is something I aspire to develop in my own work.
May 2025:
Very good book. Helpful for my thesis work. Will take some time to digest. I wish there were more chapters on emotion as well.
Understood a lot more of the book than the first time around. The subtlety of analysis here is something I aspire to develop in my own work.
May 2025:
Very good book. Helpful for my thesis work. Will take some time to digest. I wish there were more chapters on emotion as well.
May 4, 2022
I hate this book…
Okay, that’s a lie. I didn’t hate this book. I admit part of my difficulty with it was that it was my first time dipping my toes into applied analytic philosophy. Being schooled primarily in continental philosophy, it was a bit of a culture shock. The massive emphasis on language, logic, truth-value, and meaning-statements was utterly deterring for me. It almost felt as if I was reading a new language, because it used such precise terms to discuss such specific concepts and principles. But, in reading it, it also felt so shallow. Restricting one’s philosophical investigation to language, logic, etc. seems so boring to me.
On the one hand, it was probably well above my head. On the other, the conclusion seemed to not really add anything to the discussion. Perhaps if I were able to take my time with it, I’d appreciate it more, but I just don’t.
Content-wise, this was an analytic philosophical text on action and emotion. The conclusion didn’t seem to be anything novel. He basically concluded that to will something ultimately entails attempting to bring about the same state of affairs that one wills by performing an action that one is capable of not performing for the very purpose of bringing about the same state of affairs that one is willing.
That’s it. 170 pages, and that’s the conclusion. No need for spoiler tags, in my opinion :p
Okay, that’s a lie. I didn’t hate this book. I admit part of my difficulty with it was that it was my first time dipping my toes into applied analytic philosophy. Being schooled primarily in continental philosophy, it was a bit of a culture shock. The massive emphasis on language, logic, truth-value, and meaning-statements was utterly deterring for me. It almost felt as if I was reading a new language, because it used such precise terms to discuss such specific concepts and principles. But, in reading it, it also felt so shallow. Restricting one’s philosophical investigation to language, logic, etc. seems so boring to me.
On the one hand, it was probably well above my head. On the other, the conclusion seemed to not really add anything to the discussion. Perhaps if I were able to take my time with it, I’d appreciate it more, but I just don’t.
Content-wise, this was an analytic philosophical text on action and emotion. The conclusion didn’t seem to be anything novel. He basically concluded that to will something ultimately entails attempting to bring about the same state of affairs that one wills by performing an action that one is capable of not performing for the very purpose of bringing about the same state of affairs that one is willing.
That’s it. 170 pages, and that’s the conclusion. No need for spoiler tags, in my opinion :p
October 30, 2026
Look, Action, Emotion and Will gets real about the stuff most books tiptoe around. Kenny, Anthony talks about failure, money, and embarrassment like a friend who's been through it, no fluff, no polish. It's rough around the edges. Great for readers who like it honest, skip if you want inspiration.
October 11, 2015
Goodreads' summary is of course nonsense: philosophers were discussing and theorising about the emotions for as long as we have any records of them. It didn't start in the 50s, as Anthony Kenny is well aware, since he references (and criticises) views from Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes and Hume. What started in the 50s, in Anglophone philosophy, was the new area called "the philosophy of action". This emerged in the wake of Wittgenstein's later writings, and the parallel works he inspired by Gilbert Ryle and Elizabeth Anscombe. All these thinkers repudiated the Cartesian model of a detached intelligence, attending to private sensory objects and utterly mysterious in how it interacted with the physical world. Instead came in an emphasis on criteria, identification, public knowledge and practice, and close attention to how every day language was used, to avoid stultifying simplifications and misconceptions which (allegedly) were the usual fruits of the old style of philosophising.
In this work Kenny exposes the hidden Cartesianism still lurking in Hume and the empiricists who imagined themselves free of the taint. Behaviourism and experimental psychology generally gets put in its place for trading in conceptual confusions (at least with respect to studying emotions). Ryle and Anscombe also get corrected for their perceived missteps. Ordinary language is examined, but Kenny noted when its distinctions are not illuminating or important, and he is happy to put up his own theory of volition. Donald Davidson took some of these ideas forward in his essays on actions and events. Altogether this is mostly a period piece, its best ideas having been taken forward since then. It's a good example of what "Oxford philosophy" actually was like at its best. Brentano and Husserl do get examined.
In this work Kenny exposes the hidden Cartesianism still lurking in Hume and the empiricists who imagined themselves free of the taint. Behaviourism and experimental psychology generally gets put in its place for trading in conceptual confusions (at least with respect to studying emotions). Ryle and Anscombe also get corrected for their perceived missteps. Ordinary language is examined, but Kenny noted when its distinctions are not illuminating or important, and he is happy to put up his own theory of volition. Donald Davidson took some of these ideas forward in his essays on actions and events. Altogether this is mostly a period piece, its best ideas having been taken forward since then. It's a good example of what "Oxford philosophy" actually was like at its best. Brentano and Husserl do get examined.
August 9, 2019
This work is something of a seminal piece in the understanding of the philosophy of human action. It starts with Descartes (or to some extent with Aristotle) and looks at how following philosophers have approached issues such as motive, emotion, will and such like.
The book critiques the ideas it surveys and builds a new theory of human action.
My one disappointment was that it did not fulfill its promise to look at the emerging findings of psychology in formulating the new theory. Perhaps in places it did so, but I think psychology has added a great deal of flesh on those bones - although much of that was long after this book was first published in 1963, so it would be wrong to be overly critical on this point.
A very interesting review of the subject.
The book critiques the ideas it surveys and builds a new theory of human action.
My one disappointment was that it did not fulfill its promise to look at the emerging findings of psychology in formulating the new theory. Perhaps in places it did so, but I think psychology has added a great deal of flesh on those bones - although much of that was long after this book was first published in 1963, so it would be wrong to be overly critical on this point.
A very interesting review of the subject.
September 13, 2019
This work is something of a seminal piece in the understanding of the philosophy of human action. It starts with Descartes (or to some extent with Aristotle) and looks at how following philosophers have approached issues such as motive, emotion, will and such like.
The book critiques the ideas it surveys and builds a new theory of human action.
My one disappointment was that it did not fulfill its promise to look at the emerging findings of psychology in formulating the new theory. Perhaps in places it did so, but I think psychology has added a great deal of flesh on those bones - although much of that was long after this book was first published in 1963, so it would be wrong to be overly critical on this point.
A very interesting review of the subject.
The book critiques the ideas it surveys and builds a new theory of human action.
My one disappointment was that it did not fulfill its promise to look at the emerging findings of psychology in formulating the new theory. Perhaps in places it did so, but I think psychology has added a great deal of flesh on those bones - although much of that was long after this book was first published in 1963, so it would be wrong to be overly critical on this point.
A very interesting review of the subject.
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