How temptation works, and why it nearly stopped me writing this
is professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Humboldt Visiting Researcher at Leipzig University in Germany. He is the author of Anscombe’s Intention: A Guide (2019), the co-editor of Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change (2020) and the co-author of Reading Philosophy: Selected Texts With a Method for Beginners (2nd ed, 2020).
My editor needs this essay from me by the end of the day today. I have plenty of time to finish it before then. And yet, even as I resolve to get it finished, I recognise the possibility that I won’t. What are the ways this could happen?
There are several possibilities. For example, something like a severe illness or a power outage in my office might prevent me from meeting the deadline despite my best efforts. Or something like a family emergency might give me a reason not to meet it and, in light of this reason, I might choose to do just that.
These first two possibilities are easy enough to understand. But they are not the possibilities that interest me. The possibility I want to reflect on is the possibility that I simply will not meet the deadline – not because I was prevented from getting the essay done, nor because I found there to be a reason to give it up. It is the possibility that I just won’t act as I’ve resolved to, despite not abandoning this resolution.
