Philosophy of Mind Seminar (Friday - Week 3, TT25)

Abstract: The terminology of intentionality derives from medieval scholastic philosophy, and was revived in 1874 by Franz Brentano in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. In this work, Brentano characterised intentionality in terms of ‘the mind’s direction towards an object’. He regarded intentionality as the distinctive mark of mental phenomena which distinguishes them from physical phenomena. The early modern period is widely perceived by philosophers as not adding anything interesting to the problem of intentionality between the scholastics and Brentano. In the paper, I argue that Brentano combined both terminology (present in the late scholasticism), the concept (proposed by Brentano), and the problem of intentionality (elaborated by early modern philosophy). Moreover, I suggest that Brentano’s understanding of the concept of intentionality would not be possible without the early modern discussion of representationalism in terms of the explanatory role of experience — discussion, that is, of how perceptual experience gives us cognitive contact with the mind-independent, external world.