Relational Intentionality: Brentano and the Aristotelian Tradition

244 Pages·2018·2.8 MB·English

by  Hamid Taieb

Primary Sources in Phenomenology
Franz Brentano Studies
Hamid Taieb
Relational
Intentionality:
Brentano and
the Aristotelian
Tradition
Primary Sources in Phenomenology
Franz Brentano Studies
Series Editors
Guillaume Fréchette, University of Salzburg, Austria
Kevin Mulligan, University of Italian Switzerland, Lugano, Switzerland
Peter Simons, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Barry Smith, University at Buffalo, NY, USA
This Series makes available important source materials from Austro-German
philosophy relating to the foundations and background of currents of thought that
shaped decisively the development of twentieth century philosophy. It is divided
into four main sections, each of them containing materials or translations of
otherwise inaccessible sources, supplemented by interpretative studies designed to
establish the systematic implications, historical context, and contemporary relevance
of the materials presented. The four sections are 1) Franz Brentano; 2) The School
of Brentano (including Marty, Meinong, Twardowski, Ehrenfels, Husserl, and
Stumpf); 3) Early phenomenology (including Scheler, Geiger, Pfänder, and
Reinach.); and 4) Influences of Austro-German philosophy in other disciplines,
especially in logic, linguistics, and theoretical psychology (from Bolzano to Bühler).
The Series combines editions and translations of original and previously unpublished
works with volumes having a stronger focus on interpretation, including both
monographs and edited collections.
This Series has been established in response to the increasing interest in early
phenomenology and early analytic philosophy of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. It promotes publications, both new editions and interpretative
works, relating to a period and a current of the history of nineteenth and twentieth
century philosophy which is of central importance for both analytic philosophy and
phenomenology, but which until quite recently has been almost completely neglected
by both of these fields.
This sub-series focuses on Franz Brentano and includes new editions and
translations of his posthumous works. In addition, it contains monographs and
edited collections that deals with the interpretation and evaluation of Brentano’s
philosophy.
More information about this subseries at http://www.springer.com/series/15615
Hamid Taieb
Relational Intentionality:
Brentano and the Aristotelian
Tradition
Hamid Taieb
University of Salzburg
Salzburg, Austria
ISSN 0924-1965
Primary Sources in Phenomenology
Franz Brentano Studies
ISBN 978-3-319-98886-3 ISBN 978-3-319-98887-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98887-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018953185
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Preface
The word “intentionality” brings to mind a tangle of philosophical notions. The
term plays a central role not just in the phenomenological tradition, but also in ana-
lytic philosophy of mind, and often serves to designate the pure “aiming at an
object” or aboutness. Aboutness is a property that belongs to mental activities with-
out regard to whether the object of the activity exists or not: it is possible to think
about non-existent things, such as a golden mountain, or even impossible things,
such as a round square. However, the term “intentionality” is also used to name a
special kind of relation between a subject and the outer world, namely, the act’s
cognitive access to reality, or (mental) reference, a property that belongs only to acts
having an object that exists. When discussing this access, philosophers often won-
der whether “intentionality” can be reduced to a causal relation (that is, whether the
mental act is related to its object as an effect is to its cause), or whether “intentional-
ity” and causality should be kept distinct. In other words, the discussion shifts, little
by little, from the act’s aiming at an object to its reference to reality, and then from
reference to causality. These shifts in meaning bring with them a series of problems.
While it might well be legitimate to identify reference with causality, it is less so to
treat the pure aiming at an object simply as a causal relation, or to merge, without
further explanation, this aiming with the act’s reference to reality: thinking about
something does not entail that the thing exists (except perhaps in some specific
cases such as perception). Though this last point is uncontroversial, philosophers do
not always take adequate heed of it; indeed, this leads some of them to fall into a
dilemma: on the one hand, they are willing to understand “intentionality” in rela-
tional terms when the question is how to ensure our access to reality, even while, on
the other hand, they resign themselves to accepting that there can be a non-relational
“intentional” aiming, that is, one that does not have an existent object (this is true at
any rate when they reject the possibility that objects can have a specific, intra-psy-
chic existence insofar as they are thought about). The issue is perhaps not so much
a philosophical difficulty as a problem of terminology, since the word “intentional-
ity” is used here to talk about distinct things—namely, on the one hand, the act’s
reference to reality and, on the other hand, its aboutness. Thus, in a study of the
nature of intentionality and of its logico–linguistic and ontological features, it seems
v
vi Preface
that a good thing to do would be to begin by clarifying the usage of the term
“intentionality.”
The variations of meaning in strictly philosophical studies have repercussions in
historical research. Among works that address the theme of “intentionality” in the
history of philosophy, some of them at times deal with the act’s pure aiming, at other
times with its reference. When they investigate the causal dimension of “intention-
ality”, it is in fact not the nature of the aboutness of thought that is analyzed, but
rather the nature of its reference to reality. When discussing the major thinkers on
intentionality – whether Aristotle, medieval authors, or the Austro-German philoso-
phers – historical studies have sometimes failed to keep these ideas fully distinct
from one another. Indeed, these studies usually begin with intentionality as it is
discussed by Brentano, that is, understood as the pure aiming at an object. They then
go back to the passages in Aristotle’s De anima on the special kind of “being
affected” (πάσχειν) that is brought about by the reception of “sensible forms with-
out matter” (τῶν αἰσθητῶν εἰδῶν ἄνευ τῆς ὕλης), that is (so it seems), they turn to
“intentionality” understood as causality. They then touch on the theory, laid out by
Thomas Aquinas in his Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, of the assimilation of
cognitive acts to reality, that is, “intentionality” as reference, explained in terms of
“similarity” (similitudo). They then discuss “cognized being” (esse cognitum) as
theorized by Duns Scotus, that is, the ontological status of objects insofar as they are
thought about. And finally, depending on their particular concerns, they conclude
with either phenomenology or analytic philosophy of mind, each understood as the
right path to the elucidation of the nature of intentionality, even if it is not always
obvious whether it has to do with thought’s pure aiming at the object or with its
reference to reality. Admittedly, historians of philosophy are largely justified for
these variations, inasmuch as intentionality seems to have sometimes been likened
to causality in the Aristotelian tradition. For Aquinas, following the lead of Albert
the Great, psychic causality has the unique feature that when the form is received in
the soul without its matter, it has “intentional being” (esse intentionale); however,
this does not lead Aquinas to propose a theory of causal reference, since cognitive
access to reality is explained in terms of similarity. Likewise, Brentano in his 1867
study of Aristotle’s psychology seems very much to identify the psychic causality in
the De anima with intentionality in the sense of “aboutness,” since he affirms that
the form received without matter is “objectively” (obiective) present in the soul—
and here the term should be understood in its original medieval sense, as designat-
ing the ontological status of things insofar as they are objects of thought. The
variations mentioned above are therefore understandable. However, some hints at
how to avoid these pitfalls can be found in texts of the past. Indeed, though
Brentano’s monograph on Aristotle may have helped to produce some confusions,
especially as regards the assimilation of intentionality with causality, nevertheless,
in his later works he draws a distinction between the intentional relation, the causal
relation and the relation of reference. Moreover, he finds this tripartition already in
Aristotle, specifically in Metaphysics Δ.15, which is about the different classes of
relation. Similar distinctions were made by authors in antiquity and the Middle
Ages, precisely in the context of the reception of Aristotle’s texts on relations. This
Preface vii
might make it possible to clear up the confusions mentioned above, in Brentano and
perhaps in Aristotle, but also in medieval thinkers and the Aristotelian tradition
more generally. The present work is intended to meet these desiderata: from its
point of departure in Brentano, it goes back to Aristotle, then considers Alexander
of Aphrodisias and the Neoplatonist commentators, before proceeding to the scho-
lastic philosophers of the late Middle Ages and Suárez in the early modern period;
it aims at analyzing these authors’ accounts of intentionality, and the way they dis-
tinguish it from the relations of causality or reference. This is, in broad strokes, the
topic of this work. From the point of view of method, it will aim to harmonize
scholarship over the longue durée with systematic analysis in the history of
philosophy.
This book is the outcome of my doctoral and postdoctoral research conducted
between 2010 and 2017 at the University of Lausanne and the École Pratique des
Hautes Études in Paris, under the supervision of Christophe Erismann and Alain de
Libera; at the University of Geneva as a collaborator with Laurent Cesalli and Kevin
Mulligan; and at the University of Salzburg as a collaborator with Guillaume
Fréchette. Parts of it are also the result of a semester I spent as a visiting doctoral
student at the Humboldt University in Berlin under the supervision of Dominik
Perler. I am immensely indebted to all the people I have mentioned for their crucial
support during the development of this work; I am especially grateful to Laurent
Cesalli, who followed my project from the beginning, devoting a great deal of time
to providing me with both advice and encouragement, and has now generously sup-
ported the translation of my manuscript from his fund in the Philosophy Department
at the University of Geneva. I would also like to thank Olivier Boulnois and
Alexandrine Schniewind for their valuable contributions as members of my thesis
committee, as well as Jean-Baptiste Brenet for writing the preliminary report on my
thesis. I am grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for its help during
those 7 years, and to the Austrian Science Fund, which has supported me since
2016. I also thank the École Normale Supérieure in Paris for welcoming me as a
foreign student for a semester.
I had the opportunity to present my work many times at conferences, in written
form, and in less formal discussions. In addition to Charles Girard-Cédat and
Jocelyn Groisard, with whom I worked at the University of Lausanne, and Alessandra
Lukinovich, whose introduction to ancient Greek I took at the University of Geneva,
I would also like to thank, for their insight, advice, and help (even if some of them
do not remember, I do!), Monika Asztalos, Elena Băltuţă, Jocelyn Benoist, Thomas
Binder, Federico Boccaccini, Philipp Blum, Alessandro Canale, Victor Caston,
Dominique Demange, William Duba, Sten Ebbesen, Santiago Echeverri, Michael
Esfeld, Denis Fisette, Russell Friedman, Heine Hansen, Philippe Hoffmann, Uriah
Kriegel, Stefan Kristensen, Lukáš Lička, Can Laurens Loewe, John Magee, Claudio
Majolino, John Marenbon, Olivier Massin, Mary McCabe, Martine Nida-Rümelin,
Franco Paracchini, Irène Rosier-Catach, Sébastian Roth, Paolo Rubini, Stephan
Schmid, Mark Textor, Anna Tropia and Julia Wilam. I am especially indebted for
our many discussions to Parwana Emamzadah, Lorenzo Menoud, and Laure Piguet.
I also thank the two anonymous referees who read and commented on the first
draft of this book, as well as the editors of the Primary Sources of Phenomenology
viii Preface
series, Guillaume Fréchette, Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith, for
their support.
I am very grateful to Ian C. Drummond, who translated the manuscript of this
book from French into English. His work was exceptionally precise, and revising it
was almost a pleasure. I thank also Ben Sheredos, who helped me to revise the
translation of the Introduction.
I would have liked for Curzio Chiesa to read this book. We began a discussion
about the third class of relations in Metaphysics Δ.15, but left it unfinished; now,
unfortunately, it can no longer be resumed. I dedicate this book to him.
Salzburg, Austria Hamid Taieb
Sagten wir doch schon früher, es handele sich beim Psychischen
um eine einseitige reale Relation, und somit um etwas ganz
Eigenartiges.
Oskar Kraus, letter to Franz Brentano, 6 October 1904
Cavenda est aequivocatio, quando agimus de esse cognito, aut
aliis similibus denominationibus intellectus.
Francisco Suárez, Disputationes metaphysicae 54.2.13
τό τε γὰρ διανοητὸν σημαίνει ὅτι ἔστιν αὐτοῦ διάνοια.
Aristotle, Metaphysics Δ.15
ix