Jennifer Hornsby

Jennifer Hornsby (born 1951) is a British philosopher with interests in the philosophies of mind, action, language, as well as feminist philosophy. She is currently a professor at the School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London. She is well known for her opposition to orthodoxy in current analytic philosophy of mind, and for her use of J. L. Austin's Speech Act Theory to look at the effects of pornography.

Hornsby earned her PhD from the University of Cambridge under the direction of Bernard Williams. She also earned a BA and MPhil from Oxford and London, respectively. She taught at the University of Oxford for 17 years before moving to Birkbeck College, London. She was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1996 to 1997.

She is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Hornsby's work focuses primarily on the philosophies of mind, action, language, and feminist philosophy.

Hornsby's action theory is significantly influenced by the philosophy of Donald Davidson. In her book Actions (1980), she argues that actions are events occurring beneath the surface of the skin. The argument for this turns on an ambiguity in the slogan "all actions are bodily movements". The ambiguity stems from the fact that 'move' is one of a class of verbs that can occur either transitively or intransitively. Nominal expressions containing such verbs are therefore ambiguous: for example, 'the movement of the flag' can refer either to the action of someone's moving the flag or to the resultant movement of the flag. As we only ever answer a question about what someone did by using transitive verbs --- e.g. 'Jack moved his arm', not 'Jack's arm moved' (unless the latter is taken to imply that the former is true) --- the slogan "all actions are bodily movements" is only true if 'movement' is read transitively. This ambiguity noted, Hornsby then points out that if A V_T-s B, then A caused B to V_I ('_T' and '_I' serving to disintguish between transitive and intransitive uses of the relevant verbs). If Jack raised_T the flag, Jack caused the flag to rise_I. As causes and effects must be distinct, we must therefore also distinguish between Jack's raising_T his arm from Jack's arm's rising_I, the former causing the latter. So actions are bodily movements_T, which cause bodily movements_I. The final move is to claim that we know from physiology that the causes of bodily movements_I are events that occur beneath the surface of the skin. Therefore, actions occur beneath the surface of the skin.

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