  There has been a notable or notorious debate about whether the agent's reasons in acting are causes of the action — a longstanding debate about the character of our common sense explanations of actions.  Some philosophers have maintained that we explain why an agent acted as he did when we explicate how the agent's normative reasons rendered the action intelligible in his eyes. Others have stressed that the concept of ‘an intention with which a person acted’ has a teleological dimension that does not, in their view, reduce to the concept of ‘causal guidance by the agent's reasons.’ But the view that reason explanations are somehow causal explanations remains the dominant position. Finally, recent discussions have revived interest in important questions about the nature of intention and its distinctiveness as a mental state, and about the norms governing rational intending.