Intention and presence

the notion of presentialitas in the fourteenth century

Joel Biard

pp. 123-140

in: Sara Heinämaa, Vili Lähteenmäki, Pauliina Remes (eds), Consciousness: from perception to reflection in the history of philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2007

Abstrakt

This chapter discusses intention and presence in medieval philosophy. It introduces and analyses a high-level debate on intentionality and the mode of presence of the object in the fourteenth century. The medieval philosophers discuss, among other things, the notion of intentio as tending towards, as well as the difference between presence in the strict sense (the object being really present) and presentiality, namely the mode in which an object (both present and absent) can be present to a thinker or a mind. In addition to introducing dilemmas which, later, triggered the modern scholarship on intentionality through Franz Brentano, the medieval particularities become apparent in the article. For instance, before William of Ockham the philosophers insist on a symmetry or reversibility of the intentional relation: the subject's tending towards the object is matched by the object's presence to the subject, and the conscious subject is thus not given any focal significance in the inquiry

Cited authors

Brentano Franz