The standard gloss of ‘intentionality’ as “aboutness” may be insufficiently fine-grained to capture the complexity of medieval theories of intentionality. Using Thomas Aquinas as a case study, I show that he provides distinct accounts of two aspects of the phenomenon which could be called “intentional presence” and “intentional directing.” These distinct accounts are joined together through his theory of imitation into what I call a “theory of intentionality as active imitating,” but without giving relations of likeness any work to do in the account. In each part of the account, Aquinas draws on a general metaphysical schema that applies to both mental and non-mental being, contra interpretations that view intentionality as a sui generis feature of mental states.
My paper explores Latin medieval accounts of intentionality developed after Thomas Aquinas, focusing in particular on the theories of mental presence and mental directedness defended by Hervaeus Natalis and Peter Auriol. As the paper aims to show, these two authors distinguish between the intentional and the real presence of objects to the mind, and consequently, between intentional directedness and real directedness towards objects. The paper argues that their theory, which combines detailed phenomenological insights with careful considerations about the way our mind relates to objects and reality, constitutes a valuable alternative to Aquinas’s views on presence and directedness as reconstructed by Therese Cory.
Therese Scarpelli Cory is the Oesterle Associate Professor of Thomistic Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she also directs the History of Philosophy Forum and the Jacques Maritain Center. Her work focuses on medieval theories of mind, particularly the debates that developed in the thirteenth century on topics such as self-knowing, the relationship between imagination and intellectual thought, abstraction, the metaphysics of mental action, and mental signification. She is especially interested in the influence of Greek and Islamic thought on the philosophers during this period, and in uncovering the different imaginative models that explain divergences among theories. She is the author of Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge (CUP, 2013), and is currently working on two books on Aquinas’s theory of mind.
Hamid Taieb is a DFG Emmy-Noether Research Group Leader at the Humboldt University Berlin. He works on post-Kantian philosophy, especially early phenomenology, and on medieval philosophy. His research on these philosophical traditions focuses on questions of philosophy of mind, epistemology and ontology. Most recently, he has been working on sensory qualities and perception in the two traditions in question.
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