Abstract

Seemingly, every mental act has a content or subject-matter. When I think, imagine, or hear, there appears to be a content or subject-matter of my thinking, imagining, or hearing. Now, what the difference is between this kind of content and the content of nonmental containers or containings, is a question which has beguiled even those thinkers, such as Ryle in England and physicalists in America, who are disinclined to recognize the mental as a separate ontic domain. When the problem of isolating the nature of mental content or subject-matter was revived in the 19th century, Franz Brentano followed the Scholastics in calling these contents "intentions." The editor of the present volume, while noting that the concept of "intentionality has played a very central role in such philosophical movements as phenomenology, existentialism, and neo-Scholasticism," brings out the fact that this concept also, in recent years, was taken up by "philosophers in the analytical tradition as a powerful conceptual tool...." Seminal writings on the nature of intentionality by Frege, Russell, Carnap, Hempel, Ryle, Quine, Chisholm, Wilfrid Sellars, Thomas Nagel, Aune, Linsky, Hintikka, and others are brought together in this well-organized anthology, along with an introduction, a supplement containing unpublished Sellars correspondence with David M. Rosenthal, a bibliographical essay, and an index.—W. G.