Brentano’s philosophy of mind was mainly received in contemporary philosophy of mind through his thesis that intentionality is a mark of the mental (Brentano 1874, 124f.). Some, such as Crane (1998), radicalized this thesis into a position called intentionalism, according to which intentionality is the mark of the mental. According to intentionalism, intentional contents are representations (Crane 2010); they underlie principles of individuation similar to those of Fregean senses, and they represent a state of the world. Although most intentionalists do not deny that our experience has a phenomenal character, they tend to subordinate this aspect of perceptual experience to its representational content. Intentionalism is not the only strain of contemporary philosophy of mind that draws on Brentanian resources. In fact, an increasing amount of literature on phenomenal intentionality borrows from Brentano’s philosophy of mind, and defends the view that phenomenal intentionality¾the view that the intentionality of mental content is non-relational and possessed in virtue of one’s mental content having the relevant phenomenal character¾was probably the only intentionality recognized by the Brentano school.[1] These two very different associations with Brentano’s philosophy of mind are symptomatic of an ambiguity in his published works concerning the role of the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences and the nature of intentional content. An investigation of these two aspects, on the basis of the Vienna lectures, would shed more light on Brentano’s understanding of the relation between these two aspects of mental life. It would also contribute to defining more precisely the nature of the contribution of DPRP to the phenomenal intentionality research program (see Kriegel 2013) and its position in the debate between intentionalist (or representationalist) accounts of mental states and their opponents.[2]
[1] See Kriegel (2013, 2). [2] Two recent contributions to this debate concern the intentionality of moods. See Kind (2013) and Mendelovici (2013). See Montague (2009) for a formulation of this problem that takes into account the position of the school of Brentano.