Volume 98, Issue 4, Fall 2024
Kinds of Intentionality and Kinds of Approaches to Intentionality
Charles Girard
Pages 395-410
https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq2025324303
Intentional, How? On the Consequences of Some Medieval Views of Mental Acts
Brentano famously claimed that intentionality is one of the marks of the mental and that he found his concept of intentionality in the Middle Ages. It is now known that intentionality does not constitute a mark of the mental in medieval thought: scholars have shown that extra-mental things also display intentionality. In addition to this argument based on extra-mental things, I argue that some medieval theories do not present intentionality as a feature of all mental acts. Moreover, I argue that certain medieval theories differ in another way from Brentano¡¯s conception of intentionality: when presented with intentionally related objects (e.g., my past cognition of the rose), mental acts prove unable to focus freely on one or the other object (the act or the rose).