Abstract
If there is a common theme through the rich diversity of Max Charlesworth’s academic life and works, it is the quest to understand human action as meaningful, significant and subject to interpretation rather than reducible to the explanatory techniques of positivistic science. This orientation is summed up in the philosophical concept of intentionality. Intentionality is a key notion for continental philosophers whose ideas formed the subject-matter of Max’s legendary course in ‘Contemporary European Philosophy’ at Melbourne University and later, of the foundation philosophy programs at Deakin University. The origins of the concept of intentionality are to be found in mediaeval philosophy – another of Max’s teaching areas, and a commitment to intentionality is deeply implicit in his engagement with the religious and the spiritual as well as with ethics.
In this essay I trace the changing conceptions of intentionality in recent philosophy and in doing so, indicate developments within the continental philosophical tradition and its shifting relations with the analytical tradition in Australian philosophy.
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- 1.
This is the popular slogan used to summarise Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis in Le Deuxième Sexe (1949).
- 2.
The “posthuman” refers to those currents of thought which, following Foucault’s “death of Man” and thinkers like Deleuze, Derrida, and Irigaray, have initiated a critique of the concept of “Man” or “the human” inherited from post-Enlightenment thinking. Posthumanist thinkers and fields of study show how these concepts mask important assumptions and biases relating to gender, race, colonialism, and our relationship to nature including the role of science and technology. They seek new ways of thinking about what it means to be human, enlisting perspectives of those minorities traditionally excluded from our Eurocentric, gendered, and anthropomorphic approaches (Braidotti and Hlavajova 2018).
- 3.
Especially in the form espoused by prominent thinker on this topic, Rosi Braidotti, who argues for a new (posthuman) way of preserving subjectivity without the implicit biases (Braidotti 2013, p.12).
- 4.
- 5.
For example, “it is necessary that…” These are said to be intensional contexts – characterised by failure of substitutivity salva veritate. See Caston 2001, for entailment patterns that are violated by intensionality.
- 6.
See, for example, Siewert 2011.
- 7.
For present purposes, I am confining the discussion to Avicenna’s theory of perception with particular reference to his account of the estimative faculty (wahm) and intention (ma‘nā) as these are developed mainly in his Al-Najat (Avicenna 1952) and his Al-Shifā (Avicenna 1959). Averroës, along with others contested many of Avicenna’s ideas including the status and scope of the estimative faculty. A full discussion of these debates is beyond the scope of this paper.
- 8.
Other inner senses include the common sense (sensis communis) responsible for integrating the individual sensations such as touching and seeing into a unity; imaginative power (imaginativa), imagination (phantasia), and memory (memoria).
- 9.
Wahm is a highly contentious notion which stimulated lively debates amongst Avicenna’s contemporaries, and continues to do so in contemporary scholarship.
- 10.
McGinnis (2010, pp.97–99) also adopts this terminology.
- 11.
There are, of course, developments of this in scholarly research as well. See in particular, Hoffmeyer 2012.
- 12.
Sheets-Johnstone (2010, p. 219) points out: “Husserl wrote of action, but he did not write of active or enactive organisms; he wrote of bodies, but he did not write of embodied organisms…”
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Harney, M. (2019). Intentionality – Evolution of a Concept. In: Wong, P., Bloor, S., Hutchings, P., Bilimoria, P. (eds) Considering Religions, Rights and Bioethics: For Max Charlesworth. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18148-2_11
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