Abstract
This is a book about Mulla Sadra’s ideas of soul, existence and perception constructed around the problem of intentionality as the problem is posited by Brentano. Intentionality is presented as a revival of medieval discussions, and according to Brentano it is the characteristic of what mental is. The intentionality problem is that every mental phenomena manifest a common characteristic which separates them from physical phenomena. The introductory chapter gives a general description of Brentano’s problem of intentionality together with its journey in the post-Brentano philosophy. The following chapters discuss intentionality problem on the basis posited in the first chapter and intentionality problem is translated into medieval discussions on the soul and its immateriality, on soul as a general term for various faculties, on mental existence and on perception.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
As Dennett does in his Intentional Stance (1998).
- 2.
- 3.
For Searle’s criticism of these ‘divide and conquer’ tactics, see Manson 2003, 137–139.
- 4.
Searle remained within the context of the naturalistic project and claimed that a subjective and anti-reductionist explanation of intentionality is achievable. This approach appears to be a more complex and tangled version of reductionism. He rejects the idea of any form of dualism and thinks that eventually and fundamentally consciousness is supposed to be understood in physical terms and its non-reducibility is not to be taken as a second property which is distinct and over and above the neurobiological base (Searle 2002(b), 60 ff.). He tries to keep the physicalist nature of his theory with a causal principle in which consciousness is closely related to its neurobiological base.
- 5.
“In recent decades, the connection between consciousness and intentionality is being gradually lost in theoretical writings in linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy. There has been an effort of varying degrees of explicitness to try to separate the issues concerning intentionality from those concerning consciousness. I think the underlying and perhaps unconscious motivation for this urge to separate intentionality from consciousness, even among people who do not share the ideology of the behaviourist-materialist tradition, is that we do not know how to explain consciousness, and we would like to get a theory of intentionality which will not be discredited by the fact that we do not have a theory of consciousness” (Searle 1991, 48).
- 6.
It must be remembered that micropsychism is not yet panpsychism, as “some ultimates” are regarded to be experiential.
- 7.
Especially Strawson’s panpsychism is important for it allows the idea of consciousness at the level of matter (micropsychism).
- 8.
The term reism is first used by Kotarbinski to refer to the claim that only things exist (Woleński 1996, 355).
- 9.
Irrealia such as: intentional objects, immanent objects, existence and nonexistence, modalities, universals, and contents of judgements (Woleński 2012).
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
Here, I follow Kaukua’s interpretation for Ṣadrā’s complex approach to self awareness (Kaukua 2015, 191), yet it should be reminded that further studies that specifically scrutinizes the Sadrian self-awareness is much beneficial.
- 13.
Fortunately, recent scholarship in English language provides substantial studies on the matter:
- 14.
- 15.
‘Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the scholastics of the middle ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, (…) reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity.
This intentional inexistence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves ‘(Brentano 1973, 1.124–25).
- 16.
Hasse gives an extensive evaluation of the relation of some of these notions to intentionality (Hasse 2000, 127–128).
- 17.
See Aristotle 1984–1991, DA, 414a29–415a12: “Of the psychic powers above enumerated some kinds of living things, as we have said, possess all, some less than all, others one only. Those we have mentioned are the nutritive, the appetitive, the sensory, the locomotive, and the power of thinking. Plants have none but the first, the nutritive, while another order of living things has this plus the sensory.”
References
Al-Kutubi, Eiyad S. 2015. Mullā Ṣadrā and Eschatology: Evolution of Being. London/New York: Routledge.
Avicenna. 1405/1985. al-ʿIbāra. ed. Ibrahim Madkur. Qum: Maktabat Āyat Allāh al-ʿUẓmā al-Marʿashī al-Najafī.
Black, Deborah. 2011. Averroes on Spirituality and Intentionality in Sense Perception. In In the Age of Averroes: Arabic Philosophy in the Sixth/Twelfth Century, ed. Peter Adamson, 159–174. London: Warburg Institute.
Brentano, Franz. 1973. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkt). Trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Bynum, T. Ward. 1993. A New Look at Aristotle’s Theory of Perception. In Aristotle’s De Anima in Focus, ed. Michael Durrant, 90–109. London: Routledge.
Caston, Victor. 1998. Aristotle and the Problem of Intentionality. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (2): 249–298.
———. 2001. Connecting traditions, Augustine and Greeks on intentionality. In Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality, ed. Dominik Perler, 23–48. Leiden, Boston, Koeln: Brill.
Chisholm, R.M. 1957. On Perceiving. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz, and Barry Smith. 2004. Brentano’s Ontology: From Conceptualism to Reism. In The Cambridge Companion to Brentano, ed. Dale Jacquette, 197–219. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dennett, Daniel C. 1998. Intentional Stance. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Dretske, Fred. 1995. Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Elffers-van Ketel, Els. 1991. The Historiography of Grammatical Concepts: 19th and 20th – Century Changes in the Subject-Predicate Conception and the Problem of Their Historical Reconstruction. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi.
George, Rolf, and Glen Koehn. 2004. Brentano’s Relation to Aristotle. In The Cambridge Companion to Brentano, ed. Dale Jacquette, 20–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goldberg, Nathaniel. 2004. Is Aristotle’s Philosophy of Mind Functionalist? Philosophical Writings 26: 47–69.
Hasse, Dag Nikolaus. 2000. Avicenna’s De Anima in the Latin West: The Formation of a Peripatetic Philosophy of the Soul, 1160–1300. London/Turin: The Warburg Institute.
Haugeland, John. 1998. Having Thought. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Hedwig, Klaus. 1979. Intention: The Outlines for the History of a Phenomenological Concept. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 39 (3): 326–340.
Hickerson, R. 2007. The History of Intentionality: Theories of Consciousness from Brentano to Husserl. New York: Continuum.
Jacob, Pierre. 2010. Intentionality. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/intentionality/. Accessed 19 Oct 2019.
Jacquette, Dale. 2004. Brentano’s Concept of Intentionality. In The Cambridge Companion to Brentano, Dale Jacquette, 98–130. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2015. Alexius Meinong, The Shepherd of Non-Being. Cham: Springer.
Kalin, Ibrahim. 2010. Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy: Mullā Ṣadrā on Existence, Intellect, and Intuition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kaukua, Jari. 2007. Avicenna on Subjectivity: A Philosophical Study. Dissertation. University of Jyväskylä.
———. 2015. Self-Awareness in Islamic Philosophy: Avicenna and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Khatami, Mahmoud. 2004. From a Sadraean point of view: Towards an elimination of the Subjectivistic self. London: London Academy of Iranian Studies.
Kriegel, Uriah, and Kenneth Williford. 2006. Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Manson, Neil C. 2003. Consciousness. In Searle, ed. Barry Smith, 128–154. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McDonnell, Cyrill. 2006. Brentano’s Revaluation of the Scholastic Concept of Intentionality into a Root-Concept of Descriptive Psychology. Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society, 125–172. http://eprints.nuim.ie/997/1/IPS_Brentano_CyrilMcDonnell.pdf. Accessed 27 Oct 2019.
McIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. The Relationship Philosophy to Its Past. In Philosophy in History: Essays on the History of Philosophy, ed. R. Rorty, J.B. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner, 31–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moore, Asher. 1960. Chisholm on Intentionality. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 21 (2): 248–254.
Mullā Ṣadrā, Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī. 2014. The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations = Kitāb al-Mashāʿir: A Parallel English-Arabic Text. Trans. Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Provo: Brigham Young University Press.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 1978. Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī and His Transcendent Theosophy. Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy.
Pasnau, R. 1997. Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Perler, Dominik. 2001. What are intentional objects? A controversy among early Scotists. In Ancient and medieval theories of intentionality, ed. Dominik Perler, 203–226. Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill.
Quine, W.V.O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rizvi, Sajjad. 2009. Mullā Ṣadrā and Metaphysics. London/New York: Routledge.
———. 2019. Mulla Sadra. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/mulla-sadra/. Accessed 19 Oct 2019.
Rorty, R. 1993. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language. In Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon, 337–357. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, R., J.B. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner. 1984. Philosophy in History: Essays on the History of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John. 1991. Consciousness, Unconsciousness, and Intentionality. Philosophical Issues 1: 45–66.
———. 1992. Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
———. 1997. Mystery of Consciousness. New York: New York Review of Books.
———. 2002a. Consciousness and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2002b. Why Am I Not a Property Dualist? Journal of Consciousness Studies 9 (12): 57–64.
Shields, Christopher. 2009. The Aristotelian Psuchê. In A Companion to Aristotle, ed. Georgios Anagnostopoulos, 292–309. Chichester/Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Sorabji, Richard. 1972. Aristotle on Memory. London: Duckworth.
———. 1993. Body and Soul in Aristotle. In Aristotle’s De Anima in Focus, ed. Michael Durrant, 162–196. London: Routledge.
Strawson, Galen. 2008. Realistic Materialism and Other Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Tassone, Biagio G. 2012. From Psychology to Phenomenology: Franz Brentano’s ‘Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint’ and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Textor, Markus. 2017. Brentano’s Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tye, Michael. 1995. Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Woleński, Jan. 1996. Reism in the Brentanist Tradition. In The School of Franz Brentano, ed. Liliana Albertazzi, Libardi Massimo, and Roberto Poli, 357–375. Leiden: Kluwer.
———. 2012. Reism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/reism/. Accessed 17 Sept 2013.
Yoder, Jesse L. 1987. Chisholm’s Criteria of Intentionality. Philosophia 7 (3): 297–305.
Zahavi, Dan. 2006. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Parıldar, S. (2020). Introduction. In: Intentionality in Mulla Sadra. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39884-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39884-2_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39883-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-39884-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)