Intentionality

Abstract

Only during the thirteenth century, were the word “intentionality” and its cognates employed with the philosophical meaning that we nowadays attribute to them. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, moreover, we encounter the first treatises expressly devoted to intentionality. As the Latin etymology of the word indicates (in-tendere), by “intentionality” medieval philosophers mean to express the idea of a directedness or tendency of our mind toward a target. During the Middle Ages, the term was used to characterize the directness of both the mind and the will, although, across time, the term has taken on different meanings and its use has been restricted to the epistemic side alone. In the Middle Ages, intentionality is strictly connected to the explanation of the process of intellectual cognition and concept formation. Since medieval philosophers distinguish between first and second intentions (roughly, concepts of things and concepts of concepts), two major topics have been associated with intentionality: first, the explanation of the nature, the formation, and the foundation of natural-kind concepts, from which the question of the existence of intentional or intramental objects stems, and, second, the predication of intentional or second-order properties with respect to first-order concepts. Generally speaking, the different medieval treatments of intentionality depend on whether a philosopher is more inclined to regard the mind’s intentionality as a special kind of action or rather as a kind of relation from which issue different accounts of the mode of intentional inexistence. In the late Middle Ages, the theory of intentionality is seen as the clue to solve the question of universals.