Intentionality — The fundamental property of consciousness of always being directed toward an object: every mental experience is consciousness of something. The term derives from the Latin intendere, “to stretch toward” or “to aim at,” and was recovered from medieval scholastic philosophy by Franz Brentano in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). Brentano held that every mental phenomenon is characterized by the “intentional in-existence” of an object — an immanent reference to a content — and made this property the criterion that distinguishes the mental from the physical: no mental state is empty; perception, desire, judgment, imagination, and memory are always acts of or about something. Edmund Husserl, a student of Brentano, made intentionality the central axis of phenomenology, analyzing the correlation between the act that intends (noesis) and the meaning intended (noema); perceiving, remembering, and willing are distinct ways in which consciousness relates to its objects. Thus “there is no consciousness without an object” becomes the starting point of phenomenological description. Martin Heidegger shifts this thesis: human Dasein always already finds itself “in the world” and among things, so there is no closed inner sphere needing a “bridge” to reach the outside. Intentionality is closely bound up with the notions of consciousness and phenomenon, and remains a decisive concept in both phenomenology and contemporary philosophy of mind.
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