志向性 : 現在状況と歴史的背景 (三)

Abstract

Franz Brentano located the historical origin of his concept of intentional inexistence within Aristotle's psychology. In the previous (second) part of this article, however, I have argued that the formation of that concept as well as his interpretation of Aristotle was influenced greatly by Cartesian and anti-Aristotelian philosophy of mind. The purpose of this last part is to rethink the concept of intentionality from the (genuine) Aristotelian point of view. The term 'intentionality' comes from the late scholastic usage of the Latin 'intentio'. Spiegelberg and other scholars note that it is the 'extra-practical' sense of this ambiguous Latin word that is relevant for the history of 'intentionality'. They have found 'intentio' in this sense in twelfth and thirteenth century translation of Arabic philosophers : Arabic terms 'ma'na' and 'ma 'qul' were rendered as 'intentio' in medieval Latin translation of Al-Farabi and Avicenna. While these Arabic terms also have a wide range of meanings, it is worth noting that the philosophical usage of these terms often has Greek precedent in Aristotle. One of the most significant examples is the translation of the opening chapter of Aristotle' s De Interpretatione, in which Greek 'νόημα' was translated into the Arabic 'ma'qul' (Al-Farabi) or 'ma'na' (Avicenna), and then these Arabic into the Latin 'intentio'. Thus we can trace back the origin of the concept of intentionality to this Aristotelian concept of νόημα (thought). For Aristotle, the function of νόημα closely connected with language. A word is a sign of νόημα and a combination or separation of νόηματα makes an utterance or proposition (De int. 16a3ff.). But Aristotle does not mean that the meaning of a word is a mental image. He carefully distinguishes νόημα from mental image (De an. III 6). Moreover one can acquire νόημα through learning λόγος(public language); language plays a crucial role for the mind to acquire knowledge of the world (Sen. 437a9-15, De an. 426a19-24). This Aristotelian understanding of the relationship between νόημα and language suggests the idea that the intentionality of thought derives from the intentionality of language. It is true that nowadays most philosophers examining the nature of intentionality believe that language inherits its intentionality from the intentionality of mental states. But Aristotle's alternative view finds strong support from a few eminent philosophers, such as Sellars and Heidegger. Sellars defended the thesis, in opposition to Chisholm, that intentional phenomena are fundamentally linguistic. Heidegger holds that the insight of Plato "λόγος is λόγος τινός" (a statement is statement of

about something), which is developed in Aristotle's semantic theory in De Interpretatione, was rediscovered by Husserl with his concept of intentionality. As Heidegger recognizes, it is not at all self-evident and not so simple to see this "world-involving" character of language. Thus the Aristotelian approach to intentionality still remains worth pursuing further.