mps@duke.cs.duke.edu (Michael P. Smith) (06/01/87)
In <399Asdcc3.ucsd.EDU> Steve Bloch asks: >Would someone be so kind as to post the original definition of >"intentionality", by Brandon or whatever the name was? From Franz Brentano, PSYCHOLOGIE VOM EMPIRISCHEN STANDPUNKT (1874): Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomena includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. ... This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomena exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves. (pp.88 -- 89 of translation by McAlister, et. al., of Kraus's 1924 edition, RKP, 1973) There is much good material in Ausonio Marras, ed. INTENTIONALITY, MIND AND LANGUAGE, U. of Ill. Press, 1972.
hdc@trsvax.UUCP (06/05/87)
In four words, consciousness is consciousness *of*. "Talk of invading Libya, no talk of invading South Africa" - Mutabaruka