Heidegger: Early Writings

Philosophy 382

Professor William Blattner
Department of Philosophy
Office: 240 New North
Phone: (202) 687-4528
blattnew@georgetown.edu

Passage on Intentionality from Brentano

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity .   Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way.   In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on.  

— Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 88. My italics.