A Critical Examination of the Structure of "Intention" from Donald Davidson and Mulla Sadra’s Viewpoint

The basic issue of this research is to examine and analyze the definition of "intention" in the philosophy of Davidson and Mulla Sadra, and its purpose is to distinguish "intentional action" from "unintentional". Clarifying the nature of this action and its precise definition is important in practical wisdom and some sciences such as jurisprudence, law, and ethics; because the subject of these sciences is intentional action. Davidson does not consider "intention" to be an independent mental state and reduces it to "the causality of belief and desire in performing an action"; therefore, an action is an intention if and only if it is the effect of the desire and belief of the agent. Mulla Sadra is also reductionist about "intention", but unlike Davidson, he considers an intentional action as an action resulting from "the will and the Second-order awareness of the agent for the purpose of the action". The results of this research, which were obtained based on the descriptive-analytical method and through the analysis of the logical requirements of the concept of "intention", show that Davidson's definition, due to facing problems such as "non-reduction of desire to will" and "deviant causal chain"; does not prevent others. As a result, Mulla Sadra’s definition of "intention" and "intentional action" is more defensible than his definition.