Collection
Affect, Tendency, Drive: Perspectives on the Basic Structures of Intentionality
The philosophical concept “intentionality” generally designates the constitutive feature of conscious acts of being directed toward something: “objects” in a broad sense. These include things (e.g., a cup), states of affairs (e.g., that the cup is filled with coffee), and events (e.g., that a friend visits me). Objects can be intended in different ways: I may find the cup beautiful, desire to drink coffee from the cup or anticipate the friend’s arrival, etc.
In the phenomenological tradition, a significant part of the philosophical investigation is devoted to analyzing the experiential structures that constitute conscious acts and their objects. Typically, intentional directedness at determinate objects has been taken as the paradigmatic case of phenomenological study, i.e., the intentional consciousness of objects with features that can be specified. However, phenomenological research is far from being exhausted by the study of intentional directedness at determinate objects. One way to broaden the scope of phenomenological inquiries is to look at intentional experiences that are not, or not yet, directed at a determinate object and to reassess intentionality as a tendency: an open and initially indeterminate form of directedness, which can, however, become determinate. Vague curiosity can transform into an interested examination of an object; moods can crystalize in object-directed emotions.
In his oeuvre, Edmund Husserl progressively adopts such a concept of tendency to address the structures and dynamics of intentionality in different spheres, such as the theoretical, axiological, emotional, and practical domains. According to his proposal, tendencies permeate all levels of consciousness, from what he describes as the passive level of instincts and drives to the active level of intentional acts. Additionally, rich analyses of tendencies as essential aspects of conscious life can be found in the philosophical investigations conducted by authors of the Munich and Göttingen schools of phenomenology as well as in post-Husserlian phenomenology. Not only phenomenologists employ different notions of tendency to describe fundamental aspects of intentional phenomena. In psychology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy more broadly, phenomenologists’ contemporaries bring into play various concepts of tendency that aim to capture the distinct forms of striving in the psychological sphere, including unconscious processes. How do these different notions of tendency relate to each other? And how can they inform our understanding of the nature of intentionality? This special issue addresses these questions and related topics. It investigates systematically and historically the evolution of the debates on tendency in the phenomenological tradition and examines their significance for the development of theories of intentionality in the early 20th century as well as for contemporary discussions of cognition, emotion, and volition.
Editors
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Philipp Schmidt
Philipp Schmidt is a postdoctoral researcher at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU). He is a member of two projects: “Modes of Intentionality: A Historical and Systematic Analysis” and “Non-Objectual Intentionality: Tendency and Affect”. After studies in philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna, he earned his PhD in Philosophy at Heidelberg University with a dissertation titled Self-Experience and the Feeling of Being Oneself. He works in the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and philosophy of psychiatry, focusing on self and identity, intentionality, emotions, and sociality. philipp.schmidt@uni-wuerzburg.de
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Nicola Spano
Nicola Spano is a research assistant in the DFG project “Non-Objectual Intentionality: Tendency and Affect” at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU). Before embarking on this project, he was a FWO doctoral fellow at KU Leuven, where he earned his PhD with a dissertation on Husserl’s phenomenology of action and its philosophical significance in 2023. His research focuses on the phenomenology of action, ethics, and value theory. nicola.spano@uni-wuerzburg.de
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Michela Summa
Michela Summa is junior professor for Theoretical Philosophy at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU). She earned her PhD at the University of Pavia and KU-Leuven in 2010 with a dissertation on Husserl’s phenomenology of temporal and spatial constitution, published as Spatio-temporal Intertwining. Husserl’s Transcendental Aesthetic (Springer 2014). Her research focuses on the philosophy and phenomenology of perception, imagination, fiction, aesthetic experience, and sociality, as well as phenomenological psychopathology. michela.summa@uni-wuerzburg.de
