志向性 : 現在状況と歴史的背景 (一)

Abstract

Part I of this article provides a brief review of the current debate over intentionality, with an eye to show how the issues of intentionality are rooted in Franz Brentano's philosophical psychology and his philosophical background. In much of the recent literature on mind, the problem of intentionality is presented as a problem which must be faced by any philosopher who wants to hold that mental states are part of the natural world ; Naturalist philosophers are required to explain intentionality in naturalistic terms. It was the seminal work by R. Chisholm and W.V.Quine that led analytic philosophers to think of the problem of intentionality in this way. Chisholm introduced the concept of intentionality into the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy. By recasting Brentano's idea of intentional inexistence, he gave it a form that is in tune with philosophical temper of analytic philosophy ; then argued against behaviorism by showing that it is not possible to give a behavioristic account of intentional states. This suggests that intentionality is an irreducible sui generis phenomenon. However, the irreducibility of the intentional can be taken to show, as Quine argued, the baselessness of intentional idioms. In response to this dilemma, a huge variety of approaches have been taken to explain intentionality, such as neo-Cartesianism (Fodor), instrumentalism (Dennett), and neo-pragma-tism (Rorty). My interest, however, is not in the current debate about the problem of intentionality generally, but in its historical roots. For I think that contemporary positions pertinent to the problem of intentionality descend historically from the complication of Brentano's philosophy, especially from his notion of intentional inexistence. In the so-called intentionality-passage in Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Brentano seemed, as H. Spiegelberg points out, to give two distinct characterization of intentional inexistence : one in terms of the idea of 'inexistence' or 'immanence', the other in terms of the idea of 'reference to an object (or content)'. Chisholm, on the one hand, giving importance to the former characterization, holds that the notion of intentional inexistence implies the ontological thesis that there are intentional objects with a peculiar ontological status, intentional inexistence. McAlister, on the other hand, urges that even in the 'early days' Brentano did not commit to the ontological thesis. She takes intentional inexistence to be a unique relation to object. And Richardson verifies Brentano's denial of the thesis by turning to Brentano's study on Aristotle's De anima. Richardson rightly points out that the idea of intentional inexistence comes from Aristotle's theory of perception, in which the form of the perceived object is received without matter. Hence, he argues, intentional inexistence should be made out in terms of a mode of reception, not in terms of an ontologically unique type of object. There is no doubt that Aristotle's philosophy is the most important source for Brentano's psychology. However Brentano not only associated the notion of intentional inexistence with the idea of Aristotelian immaterial reception, but also explicated it in Cartesian terms, such as 'immanent objectivity' ; This suggests that Brentano found Aristotle's psychology compatible with Cartesian philosophy of mind. In Part II of this article (forthcoming) I will observe that the Cartesian conceptual framework biased Brentano's interpretation of Aristotelian psychology and show that there is tension between Aristotelian externalism and Cartesian internalism within the notion of intentional inexistence, which continues to lie at the base of the issues of intentionality.