Quaestio

Historians of medieval philosophy have always paid attention to the topic of intentionality. This is not surprising. For medieval authors, the analysis of the metaphysics and the mechanisms of human cognition became over time one of the most important instruments for approaching a bundle of basic philosophical and theological questions, such as the nature of universals, the mind-world relation, the explanation of divine knowledge, and the like. For this and other reasons, theories of cognition have been a crucial theme for historians of medieval philosophy and a privileged subject in the literature. The present volume presents a collection of articles devotes to later medieval perspectives on intentionality. Chronologically speaking, they cover the period from Thomas Aquinas to John Buridan. The reason is easy to explain: in this period, historians of medieval philosophy encounter accounts of intentionality of such a structure and sophistication that they can be compared, in a philosophically suitable way, with modern and contemporary explanations of the intentionality of mind.

Wilfrid Sellars charged that mediaeval philosophers confused the genuine intentionality of thinking with what he called the “pseudo-intentionality” of sensing. I argue that Sellars’s charge rests on importing a form of mind/body dualism that was foreign to the Middle Ages, but that he does touch on a genuine difficulty for mediaeval theories, namely whether they have the conceptual resources to distinguish between intentionality as a feature of consciousness and mere discriminative responses to the environment. In the end, it seems, intentionality cannot be “the mark of the mental” as contemporary philosophy usually takes it.

In recent philosophical debates about the nature of human emotions the intentionality of emotions plays a key part. The article explores how medieval philosophers of the late 13^th and early 14^th centuries accounted for the fact that our emotions, such as love, hate, anger and the like, are intentional mental states, states that are ‘of’ or ‘about something’. Since medieval philosophers agree that emotions (passions of the soul) are essentially movements of the appetitive powers, the intentionality of emotions is part of the broader problem of the intentionality of our appetitive acts. Do emotions and other appetitive acts derive their intentionality from the relevant cognitive acts on which their occurrence depends? And if so, how? Are appetitive acts intrinsically intentional states? The contribution discusses these and similar questions, while special attention is given to authors such as Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, (Ps-)Thomas of Bailly, Adam Wodeham and Gregory of Rimini.

It has long been a truism of the history of philosophy that intentionality is an invention of the medieval period, and within this standard narrative, the central place of Arabic philosophy has always been acknowledged. Yet there are many misconceptions surrounding the theories of intentionality advanced by the two main Arabic thinkers whose works were available to the West, Avicenna and Averroes. In the first part of this paper I offer an overview of the general accounts of intentionality and intentional being found in the linguistic, psychological, and metaphysical writings of Avicenna and Averroes, and I trace the terminology of “intentions” to a neglected passage from Avicenna’s logic. In the second part of the paper I examine the way that Avicenna and Averroes apply their general theories of intentionality to the realm of sense perception. I offer an explanation of why Avicenna might have chosen to denominate the objects of the internal sense faculty of estimation as “intentions”, and I explore the implications of Averroes’s decision to attribute intentionality to the external senses and the media of perception.

The paper examines Aquinas’s understanding of purely mental objects, i.e. things that have no existence outside the mind but only therein. According to the traditional story, Aquinas’s treatment of purely mental objects is mainly driven by semantic concerns and in particular by the need to explain the reference of terms denoting inexistent objects. The paper tries to counterbalance the traditional picture by showing how inexistent objects can be accommodated within Aquinas’s ontology. More particularly, Aquinas distinguishes different kinds of inexistent objects on the basis of their different extra-mental ground: (I) privations and negations, (II) possible objects and (III) impossible ones.

This paper argues in the first place that nominalists (such as Ockham and Buridan) are right in insisting against ontological realists (such as Plato or Scotus) that semantic universality (the property of universally representing symbols as such) does not require commitment to universal entities. However, Ockham, in his zeal to get rid of Scotus’s universal entities, swept under the carpet the issue of universal representational content of genuinely universal symbols, conflating it with the mere indifference of the information content of non-distinctive singular representations. Buridan did come up with an abstractionist theory of the formation of genuinely universal representational content to solve the resulting issues, however, the paper argues further, his solution is committed to attributing the sort of “aspectuality” to universal absolute concepts that his Ockhamist semantics denies to them. The conclusion of the paper suggests how Aquinas’s “moderate (semantic) realism” can provide a consistent solution without the ontological extravaganza of ontological realists, without conflating the mere indifference of singular representation with genuine universality, and without having to deny aspectuality to our quidditative universal concepts formed by abstraction.

In this essay I examine Henry of Ghent’s views on our mind’s ability to think and to understand something, and to reflect on its own acts and their contents. Henry explains our acquisition of mental content as a sequence of receptive and productive stages. He identifies a general principle of cognitive presence: for an object to be actually intelligible it must be actually separated from matter and cognitively present to a thinker or cognizer. Sensible, material objects that cannot be immediately present in this way must be represented via functional intermediaries in our cognitive capacities. The two main capacities of the mind are intellect and will, and in Henry’s view each of these mental powers has a reflexive ability. Henry discusses our intellect’s ability to reflect on its acts and their contents in his analysis of mental words. A complete mental word is the product of our inquiry into a thing’s essence. The inquiry is driven by our rational desire for complete cognition and based on intellect’s reflection on a first-order act and its conceptual content. This higher-order awareness of ourselves as cognitive agents enables us to assess the progression of our intellectual inquiry. Henry stresses that our natural cognitive powers are strengthened through divine exemplary standards, which continually correct the concepts we form and complete their structural resemblance with the objects of cognition in extramental reality.

Scotus holds that dispositional and occurrent cognitions (intelligible species and acts of cognition, in the medieval jargon) are qualities that inhere in the soul. These qualities have semantic or conceptual content. I show that such content is nothing in any sense real, and that this content consists either in the relevant quality’s being (factually) measured by an extramental object, or in its being such that it would be measured (counterfactually) by such an object in the case that there were such an object. The measurement relation, in the case of an intelligible species, is secured by the species’s internal structure; in the case of an act of cognition, it is secured either by some sort of (non-causal) relation to a species, or by a (non-causal) relation to an external object.

This paper focuses on Olivi’s theory of representation and aims at showing that his theory does not endorse epistemological representationalism (e.g. intelligible species). Moreover, there is no representation without self-representation for Olivi. Therefore, his account of self-representation or inner experience resembles modern higher-order theories of consciousness. But unlike most modern authors, Olivi seems to combine a higher-order thought theory with a higher-order perception one.

When contemporary philosophers look at the medieval debate on intentionality, they usually have in mind what we call “Brentano’s thesis”. Indeed, Brentano ascribes to some medieval philosophers the thesis according to which objects of thought have a special kind of being (they inexist intentionally in the mind) that explains how can our thoughts be about this or that kind of things. Here, we decided to focus on the debates among the so-called “Latin Averroists”, because they clearly show that the medieval question on intentionality cannot be reduced to the well-known theory of intentional beings. More precisely, we endeavored to understand an apparently strange question that appeared in the faculties of arts in France and in Italy in the 14^th century: to which category do intentions in the mind belong to? In Aristotelian terms: are they substances or accidents? The problem is the following: if they are accidents, how can they represent something else that an accident? If they are substances, what does it mean to affirm that we have substances in the mind, even intentional substances? After a detailed analysis of the responses one can find in Siger of Brabant, Angelo of Arezzo, Matthew of Gubbio, John of Göttingen, Anthony of Parma, Bartholomew of Bruges and John of Jandun, we try to show that only a very few philosophers adopted the formal identity thesis (frequently ascribed to Aquinas), according to which the object in the mind is formally identical with the object known outside the mind. This shows that a lot of medieval philosophers didn’t limit intentionality to intentional being or formal identity, but also considered other explanations of how the human mind can think about objects for which no representation can be found in the mind (as our thoughts about God for example).

Hervaeus’s central theme in his De secundis intentionibus is the question about the proper subject of logic. Through a long and detailed exposé on the nature of first and second intentions he arrives at his conclusion: the logical intention, which is the second intention as pertaining to the known thing, taken materially and concretely, and which is a relation and a rational being, is the proper and only subject of logic and of logic alone.

The following paper shows that prior to Ockham’s doctrine on the intuition of non-existents, two Parisian theologians (Gerard of Bologna, c. 1240/50-1317; Hervaeus Natalis, c. 1250/60-1323) had already developed, in opposition to Duns Scotus, their own theories on the possibility of having intuitive cognition of non-existent or absent things. The article uses the editions of the two theologians’ Quodlibeta prepared by the author.

This article presents a critical edition from the six surviving witnesses of Landulph Caracciolo’s (d. 1351), Scriptum in I Sententiarum, d. 23, a text that has never appeared in print before. A short introduction begins to set Landulph’s treatment of intentions and intentionality in this text into its historical, philosophical, and theological context, in particular linking it to the positions of John Duns Scotus and Peter Auriol.

Content externalism, as defended by Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge and several others, is the thesis that the content of our thoughts at a given moment is not uniquely determined by our internal states at that moment. In its causalist version, it has often been presented as a deep revolution in philosophy of mind. Yet a number of medievalists (e.g. Peter King, Calvin Normore, Gyula Klima, and myself) have recently stressed the presence of significant externalist tendencies in late-medieval nominalism, especially in William of Ockham. Now this interpretation has been cleverly challenged in the case of Ockham by Susan Brower-Toland in 2007, with arguments focusing upon Ockham’s theory of intuitive cognition (precisely where the externalist reading had seemed to be the most secured). The present paper is a reply to this challenge. I first summarize the case for seeing Ockham’s theory of intuitive cognition as a causal and externalist approach, and then critically review Brower-Toland’s arguments against it. The whole discussion, as it turns out, sheds new light upon Ockham’s conception of causality and natural order.

Three philosophical questions that are often confused should instead be keep distinct: First, what is a thought? Second, what is that in virtue of which a thought is a thought? Third, what is it that determines of what a thought is a thought? These questions raise very different issues within Ockham’s philosophy. Although Ockham’s views about the first question evolve, he seems to answer the second and the third questions in the same way, maintaining throughout his career that the intentionality of thoughts, which he expresses in terms of signification, is a primitive feature of them. Ockham’s view contrasts sharply with the view that can be found in Aquinas and others that a thought is a form of being present in an immaterial way. This alternative view explains intentionality by reducing it to the co-presence of a number of non-cognitive factors. This latter view offers hope of unifying epistemology and such sciences as optics but at the price of a very peculiar ontology. Ockham avoids this peculiarity, but his way of doing so raises issues about what determines the taxonomy of thoughts, and about whether the items which are thoughts are essentially so or whether by God’s power they could exist without being thoughts. Despite Ockham’s terminology of similitude, the taxonomy of thoughts is not fixed by internal features of the metaphysical items which are thoughts but by the objects of the thoughts, and this suggests a negative answer to the questions whether thoughts are essentially thoughts, an answer that Ockham seems not to draw explicitly but which is explicit in the work of some, like Pierre d’Ailly, who are much influenced by him.

Which are the philosophical consequences for one’s theory of objects and relations if one posits that every intentional act is correlated with an intentional object? In what follows, I tackle that question in examining the case of Franciscus de Mayronis (d. c. 1326). After suggesting a typology of theories of intentionality distinguishing monadic, relational, and correlational theories, I go on to expose Franciscus’ ontology and his conception of relations. It turns out that Franciscus’ theory of intentionality exemplifies a pattern (also found in the Brentano of 1874) according to which certain epistemic-psychological constraints (to know or to believe x always amounts to stand in a certain relation to an object distinct from the mental act) have serious consequences on the ontology.

In a recent monograph, Sabine Folger-Fonfara introduces neutral intentions as the crowning achievement of Francis of Marchia’s metaphysics. Neutral intentions express the common characteristics of first intentions (pertaining to real beings) and of second intentions (mental beings) and therefore play the role of supertranscendentals. The doctrine of neutral intentions also explains how, in Francis of Marchia’s theory of general metaphysics, being can have maximum extension. Yet this signal development in the history of philosophy does not appear in Francis of Marchia’s main philosophical work, his Commentary on the Sentences. This paper analyzes Francis of Marchia’s doctrine of intentionality in the Quodlibet and compares it to the treatments in the Questions on the Metaphysics and in the Commentary on the Sentences, and concludes that the doctrine of intentionality assumed by Questions on the Metaphysics and articulated by the Commentary on the Sentences reflects a more sophisticated understanding of the problems involved; intentions neutrae themselves can be found in the Sentences under the guise of rationes neutrae, formal characteristics of things considered independently of their presence to the mind.

The view of substance defended by William Ockham and John Buridan in the fourteenth century differs radically from the traditional Aristotelian or Thomistic view of substance. Their metaphysical position of substance not only influences the development of natural philosophy, it also changes the preconditions for cognition and epistemology. In this paper I examine the implications of this view on Buridan’s epistemology and particularly on the compatibility of his view of substance with his claim that we have simple (absolute) substance concepts. I conclude that his metaphysics undermines this claim, but I also offer a suggestion for a possible solution to this problem.