"Self-movers". Intentionality and the nature of living beings.

Drawing on Anscombe's rehabilitation of an Aristotelian philosophy of action, I shall revisit the notion of intentionality. From the Cartesian perspective in action theory the problem of intentionality is that of understanding how the immaterial mind interacts with the material body and produces voluntary action. On the contrary, from an Aristotelian perspective the movements of living bodies, though somehow dependent on their "mechanical" structure, cannot be explained in the same manner as those of inanimate matter. No activities of the soul could only be contingently related to activities of the body. Here the results of 20th century philosophy of language and the Aristotelian view strikingly converge: intentionality isn't an intimate and privately accessible state of the mind, but rather an essential feature of the activity of any living creature. This raises an interesting question: if intentionality doesn't discriminate human action from other living creature's action, what does?