Book contents
- The Philosophy of Mind
- Talking Philosophy
- The Philosophy of Mind
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Foreword
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- The Mind–Body Problem after Fifty Years
- How to Find the Neural Correlate of Consciousness
- Embodiment and the Philosophy of Mind
- Folk Psychology and Mental Simulation
- Understanding Other Minds from the Inside
- Self-knowledge: the Wittgensteinian Legacy
- Joint Attention and the First Person
- Consciousness as Existence
- Setting Things before the Mind
- Perceptual Intentionality, Attention and Consciousness
- Experience and Reason in Perception
- Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental
- Intentionality and Interpretation
- Externalism and Norms
- Mind, World and Value
- Mind, Knowledge and Reality: Themes from Kant
- The Modality of Freedom
- Dualism in Action
- Index
Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 May 2022
- The Philosophy of Mind
- Talking Philosophy
- The Philosophy of Mind
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Foreword
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- The Mind–Body Problem after Fifty Years
- How to Find the Neural Correlate of Consciousness
- Embodiment and the Philosophy of Mind
- Folk Psychology and Mental Simulation
- Understanding Other Minds from the Inside
- Self-knowledge: the Wittgensteinian Legacy
- Joint Attention and the First Person
- Consciousness as Existence
- Setting Things before the Mind
- Perceptual Intentionality, Attention and Consciousness
- Experience and Reason in Perception
- Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental
- Intentionality and Interpretation
- Externalism and Norms
- Mind, World and Value
- Mind, Knowledge and Reality: Themes from Kant
- The Modality of Freedom
- Dualism in Action
- Index
Summary
‘It is of the very nature of consciousness to be intentional’ said Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘and a consciousness that ceases to be a consciousness of something would ipso facto cease to exist.’ Sartre here endorses the central doctrine of Husserl’s phenomenology, itself inspired by a famous idea of Brentano’s: that intentionality, the mind’s ‘direction upon its objects’, is what is distinctive of mental phenomena. Brentano’s originality does not lie in pointing out the existence of intentionality, or in inventing the terminology, which derives from scholastic discussions of concepts or intentiones. Rather, his originality consists in his claim that the concept of intentionality marks out the subject matter of psychology: the mental. His view was that intentionality ‘is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon manifests anything like it.’ This is Brentano’s thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental.
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- Information
- The Philosophy of Mind , pp. 360 - 397Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022