Intentionality

Historical and Systematic Perspectives
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-3-88405-104-7
Verlag: Philosophia Verlag

Buch, Englisch, 423 Seiten, PB, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 220 mm, Gewicht: 604 g

Reihe: Basic Philosophical Concepts

Intentionalität ist eine der zentralen Eigenschaften des Geistes. Denken, Wahrnehmen, Kommunizieren, Beabsichtigen, Hassen, Lieben, Versprechen sind intentionale Akte, weil sie die Fähigkeit haben, sich auf Gegenstände und Sachverhalte in der Welt zu beziehen. Die Debatte über Intentionalität thematisiert also ein Problem von fundamentaler Bedeutung für die Philosophie und verschiedene andere Disziplinen, denn es geht dabei um nichts Geringeres als um die grundlegende Frage, wie überhaupt der Geist in Beziehung zu der Welt treten kann.
Der vorliegende Band präsentiert bislang unveröffentlichte Aufsätze, die einige der wichtigsten historischen Drehpunkte der modernen Debatte über Intentionalität erörtern und originelle Beiträge zu relevanten Aspekten dieser Debatte liefern. Ihre Autoren sind international renommierte Spezialisten wie John Searle, Autor des Vorwortes, Mauro Antonelli, Jocelyn Benoist, Stefano Besoli, Hans Burkhardt, Anita Konzelmann Ziv, Dale Jacquette, Martin Lenz, Robin Rollinger, Tetsuya Sakakibara, Hans Bernhard Schmid, John Tienson, Genki Uemura, Toru Yaegashi, und der Herausgeber, Alessandro Salice.
Die Vielfalt der Perspektiven, unter der der Begriff der Intentionalität hier behandelt wird, verleiht dem Band philosophische Reichhaltigkeit und theoretische Prägnanz und macht ihn so zu einer unverzichtbaren Quelle für all diejenigen, die sich für die Intentionalitätstheorie und verwandte Themen interessieren.

Zielgruppe

Interessenten an der Intentionalitätstheorie und verwandten Themen

Autoren/Hrsg.

Salice, Alessandro

Inhaltsverzeichnis

I. Martin Lenz Intentionality without Objectivity?
Spinoza’s Theory of Intentionality
II. Hans Burkhardt Intentionality in Leibniz’s Philosophy
III. Anita Konzelmann Ziv Bernard Bolzano:
Intentionality and the Foundations of Morality
IV. Mauro Antonelli Franz Brentano’s Intentionality Thesis
V. Robin Rollinger Anton Marty on Intentionality
VI. Stefano Besoli The Primacy of Functioning Intentionality in Edmund Husserl
VII. Alessandro Salice Phänomenologische Variationen.
Intention and Fulfillment in Early Phenomenology
VIII. Genki Uemura and Toru Yaegashi Alexander Pfänder on the Intentionality of Willing
IX. Jocelyn Benoist Why Should Inexistent Objects Be a Problem?
X. John Tienson On the Limits of Intentional Externalism
XI. Dale Jacquette Collective Intentionality in the Theory of Meaning
XII. Hans Bernhard Schmid Shared Intentionality and the Origins of Human Communication
XIII. Tetsuya Sakakibara The Intentionality of Caring

Leseproben

Alessandro Salice
Preface

As John Searle highlights in his foreword to this volume, the concept expressed by the term “intentionality” lies at the core of an intricate bundle of problems and represents one of the most intensely debated issues of last decades within philosophy and other disciplines. Linguistically, “intentionality” is the nominalization of the predicate “intentional” or “being intentional,” expressions which in some natural languages (most notably in English) also bear a non-technical sense, making them rather common in vernacular speech (“I didn’t do that intentionally!”). Scientifically, these locutions are, however, employed with a specifically technical meaning: their (re-)introduction during the second half of the nineteenth century into the philosophical jargon - especially of the German speaking world - occurred with the aim of finding solutions for problems of a mainly psychological and episte-mological nature. This conferred to the term the technical sense with which it remains in use today within relevant literature.
What, then, is intentionality in this technical sense? As with many other fundamental concepts of philosophy, at first glance intentionality appears to be a relatively simple phenomenon. Indeed, one can easily arrive at a rather uncontroversial intui-tion of what intentionality is: every one of us experiences in everyday life that his/her actions, beliefs etc. are related in one way or another to the world: we feel or perceive something, we have desire and volition about something, and we also talk to someone, do things with someone, etc. In all these cases, one can say that we are intentionally directed to objects, persons, facts, events, etc., in the world. That is, our mind has the capacity to entertain relations with something (which can be different from the mind itself). Still, these basic intuitions represent merely a starting point for philosophical research, which has as one of its main purposes to use them in order to reach a conceptual clarification of the notions at stake.
The very simplicity that characterizes intentionality makes its philosophical analysis complicated and multifaceted (some scholars even argue for its logical primitiveness and hence for the impossibility of tracing this concept back to other, simpler concepts). Being such a simple notion, intentionality is a constituent of a broad class of more complex concepts. As a consequence, the view of intentionality one endorses has immediate consequences for all the notions in which this concept is included as constituent. Take knowledge, for instance: this concept is a complex one and it appears to entail the concept of intentionality: if one knows something, then his/her knowledge is about something and hence knowledge can be described as intentional. The description of knowledge would be thus influenced by the conception of intentionality to which one subscribes. Suppose now one denies that the mind can ever enter an intentional relation with the objects of the outer world, then one also eo ipso denies that there can be any knowledge of these objects.
To get a hint of the breadth of problems directly or indirectly touched by the notion of intentionality, it suffices to look at the range of entities to which the predicate “intentional” applies. In a first sense, a given class of psychical entities is said to be intentional: thinking, perceiving, wishing, willing, etc., are intentional because they are “directed towards” something. Even if all these experiences are of or about something, they all still differ from each other: if one hates someone, s/he is directed to this person in a different way than if s/he, say, loves or perceives this person. At this stage, it is interesting to note that the aforementioned non-technical meaning of the predicate “intentional” can be explained by referring to this first sense: usually, one is used to qualifying actions as intentional if the subject has the corresponding intention to bring about such actions. Intentions are psychic experiences which move towards a correlate, i.e., what the subject aims to realize. Hence intentions, too, are generally held to be intentional (now in the technical sense of the predicate).
Speaking of a psychic entity as intentional immediately raises a number of questions, such as those concerning what confers intentional character to a given experience or what makes an experience an experience of a certain kind. Another significant question is how experiences are related to the mind (e.g., is the mind a mere bundle of experiences?). It is worth noting that, although in this context the term “mind” is usually (but also tacitly) used to refer to an “individual” mind, all these questions have analogous counterparts if one takes collectives or groups into consideration. Indeed, not only do I qua individual believe, feel, wish or act, but also we qua group are said to believe, feel, wish or act. Because intentionality epitomizes the very issue of how the mind is “made” in order for it to be related to the world, it lies at the center of disciplines such as philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology, as well as philosophy of the social sciences and social ontology (as far as one take collective intentionality into consideration).
One possible answer to the general question of what makes an experience intentional is that such property does not directly apply to experiences, but, rather, to non-psychological entities such as intentional contents, concepts, meanings, propositions and so forth. According to this view, an experience is intentional merely in a derived sense: only if it enters a relation with such entities - which may now be characterized as intentional in a primary sense - can an experience be qualified as intentional. Here the theory of intentionality crosses the philosophy of language at least in two different ways. The first regards how such contents are related to experiences and whether these contents enter such a relation only with experiences. Indeed, it seems that prima facie non-psy-chological entities like signs and signals also refer to something: are they intentional and, if so, how are they related to concepts or intentional contents? A second point of connec-tion regards how such contents are related to objects in the world. This leads to the fundamental question of whether the intentional content is solely determined by the mind or, vice versa, the reference (i.e., the intended object) determines the content of the experience (e.g., via causal relations). Moreover: does the subject always know what he refers to through intentional contents? These questions gain deep relevance as soon as one considers that intentional experiences do not necessarily point to existing objects. For instance, if one wishes for something, in standard cases the wish refers to an entity which the subject knows does not exist. But it can be a matter of a long research to discover that an intended object - on which even theories or systems of beliefs may rest - actually does not exist, as, for example, when generations of explorers, convinced of the existence of paradise on earth, went in search of it over the course of several centuries.
This last point leads to a further - but by no means final - facet of the debate on intentionality. Indeed, the objects toward which intentional acts are directed can also be characterized as “intentional”. Here at last, the debate on intentionality overlaps metaphysics, for now the ontological status of intentional objects is at issue. On the one hand, one might be keen to assume that the objects intended are the very objects which populate our world. We see trees and rivers, mountains and clouds without doubting their existence. But, as we already saw, it is fairly easy to recognize that we also have the possibility to intend objects which do not exist. We can intend paradise on earth (unaware of its non-existence) and we can even play with the thought of a round square - being perfectly aware that no round square can ever exist. So, what do we intend, when we intend something? Do we intend objects actually existing, or rather, do we intend some representative of the object - a sort of logical picture of it - which may or may not correspond to the object as such? Or should we admit that there are in some sense objects which although do not exist, can nevertheless be intended?
Many of these problems, as well as other closely related issues, are investigated in the contributions collected in this volume. Two main interests lead this edition: the first is to shed light on the historical roots of the notion of intentionality. To set some (largely arbitrary) limits to the historical period under consideration, we decided to begin with modern philosophy and end with the initial decades of nineteenth century. In this respect, we had two different goals in mind. To begin with, we paid particular attention to those philosophers who are not usually considered in standard reconstructions of the debate on intentionality (normally because they do not employ the very term “intentionality,” even if they operated with the corresponding concept). In particular, Martin Lenz investigates Baruch Spinoza’s theory of intentionality by highlighting the strong interdependence that Spinoza’s notion of intentionality bears with the monistic ontology he endorses. In his article, Hans Burkhardt stresses the mereological structure that Leibniz’s theory ascribes to intentional experiences. The question of intentionality as it is posed by the “Bohemian Leibniz”, i.e., by Bernhard Bolzano, is approached by Anita Konzelmann’s from a wholly different perspective, namely from that of moral theory, and it is focused with particular regard to volitive experiences. The investigation of this kind of experience, as it was undertaken by Alexander Pfänder, is also a starting point for the work of Genki Uemura and Toru Yaegashi, whose aim is to offer an insight on Pfänder’s general theory of intentionality. Alessandro Salice explores how, working closely with Pfänder, Adolf Reinach and Theodor Conrad raised sensitive objections to Edmund Husserl’s conception of intentionality.
Of course, the historical approach could not ignore those names which are intrinsically associated with the concept of intentionality. A further goal in assembling this volume was to highlight aspects of these philosophers’ thoughts which have, until now, not received widespread attention. Mauro Antonelli investigates the notion of immanent objects in Franz Brentano, challenging the common view within literature that Brentano endorsed such an ontological costly position as immanent realism. Stefano Besoli focuses on a rather neglected aspect of Husserl’s labyrinthine reflection on intentionality, i.e., on the so-called “functioning intentionality”. Finally, Robin Rollinger offers an unprecedented reconstruction of Anton Marty’s overall understanding of intentionality.
In addition to illuminating intentionality’s historical roots, the second main interest of the volume is to contribute original perspectives and arguments to the ongoing debate concerning intentionality. Jocelyn Benoist employs suggestions coming from Brentano to reformulate the ontological problem of non-existing entities and to highlight its (ir-)relevance for intentionality. John Tienson’s contribution envisions the internalism/externalism debate, providing evidence for a differentiated approach according to which intentionality can be framed in externalist terms only in some rigidly delimited cases. Dale Jacquette and Hans Bernhard Schmid both deal with the phenomenon of collective intentionality. Jacquette takes this notion to be reducible to individual intentionality, and he employs it to offer a formalized theory of meaning. In his discussion, Schmid reconstructs the different theories of intentionality available “on the market,” testing their conceptual aptitude to support Michael Tomasello’s assumption of a shared - but still not communicative - intentionality. Finally, Tetsuya Sakakibara chooses a phenomenological approach, which in large part coincides with an intentionality-centered approach, to describe the practice of caring.
Sincere thanks go to Prof. Hans Burkhardt, who, as general editor for the series Basic Philosophical Concepts, invited me to edit this volume and gave me complete freedom for its realization. I am also indebted to Ulrich Staudinger, who supported me in all technical matters, making the publication of this volume possible. Many thanks to all the authors - some of whom have been friends and colleagues for many years - who supported this initiative and contributed to it with their original articles. In this regard, I am particularly obliged to Prof. John Searle who accepted to write the foreword for this volume. Finally, I am grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) and Prof. Hans Bernhard Schmid for providing me with the necessary research funds for the year 2010-12 to accomplish this editorial project