Intentionality

a philosophical context

Frederick Kersten

pp. 11-25

in: John Drummond, Husserlian intentionality and non-foundational realism, Deventer, Kluwer, 1990

Abstract

Intentionality is identified by Husserl as the distinguishing feature of certain kinds of experiences, viz. those in which we are aware of objectivities of some sort Acts possessing this feature are said by Husserl to involve an intention, defined as "the relating (Beziehen) itself, in a presentation (Vorstellung) or some other analogous manner, to what is objective (ein Gegenständliches)."¹ Husserl was not the first to appeal to intentions and intentionality in order to elucidate the nature of conscious experience and the knowledge appropriate to it. Some medievals, St. Thomas Aquinas for example, provided detailed discussions of the intentionality of knowledge. After the concept of intentionality was effectively discarded by the various accounts of knowledge in the early modern period and when the extremes of German idealism and British empiricism were more clearly recognized as unattractive alternatives, the concept was revived in nineteenth-century discussions of knowledge, and it is in the context of these discussions that Husserl's theory is to understood and placed.