{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.044971671388101986, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007790368271954674, 'mean_word_length': 4.422264875239923, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 5, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory By Brian O'Shaughessy Cambridge University Press, 1980, Volume I, lxvi + 258 pp., £25.00; Volume II, xxiii + 368 pp., £27.50

By an 'act of will' or 'willing' O'Shaughnessy means a basic action (e.g. arm raising), by a 'willed event' a desired bodily event brought about in a basic action (e.g. arm rise). He argues that acts of will encompass but are not identical with the willed events that are their objects, and are thus 'genuine ontologically significant novelties' (Vol. I, p. 15); that they are de re essentially of a type one can be engaged in doing (Vol. I, p. 6); that they are identical with acts of striving and thus psychological, and, pace Davidson, that they need not be intentional under any description. It is on the basis of this last claim, in particular, that O'Shaughnessy defends his view that the topic of 'the will' is worthy of the extended investigation he gives it: 'many people use "action" more or less interchangeably with "intentional action" . . . that is seriously confused, and my espousal of "will" should be seen as an attempt to restore the proper priorities' (Vol. 1, p. lxii). Someone who has no inkling why it should be that 'the will has been derided in recent years' (Vol. I, p. lxii) most likely unthinkingly accepts the dualistic account of action which O'Shaughnessy calls 'magical volitionism', according to which the will is a force whose power is not only inexplicable but subject to no intrinsic constraints (Vol. I, p. Ixiv), and action results when the excercise of that force puts matter into motion. Given such a conception of the will it is difficult to see how it could be limited; in order to expose the mistakes in magical volitionism and as a step towards developing a correct account of the will O'Shaughnessy therefore first takes up, as the topic of Part I of his book, the question of the limits of the will. In Chapter I, after distinguishing the question of what can be a willing from the question of what can be willed, he argues that no sensation can be a willing, and that no belief, willing or striving, can be willed. Such limits to the will are logical limits on the range of intra-psychic entities which can be the objects of will. Next O'Shaughnessy turns to the question: 'Is the body the final boundary of the will?', arguing that the occurrence of an action logically requires the utilization of a 'power line'—a mechanism constitutive of the agent's having control over the direction, continuation, etc., of his action, and that to establish definitively the occurrence of an action must therefore be a matter of scientific investigation. Since he accepts Putnam's account of natural kind terms, he regards this as indicating an important respect in which the concept of action is like the concept of a natural kind.