Author: Bill Vallicella

Brentano and Whether Propositions are Intrinsically Intentional

Franz Brentano, for whom intentionality is the mark of the mental, is committed to the thesis that all instances of (intrinsic) intentionality are instances of mentality. The last post in this series considered apparent counterexamples to this thesis. But there are others.  Joseph Jedwab usefully pointed out in a comment on my old blog that propositions and dispositions are apparent counterexamples. Whether they are also real counterexamples is something we should discuss. This post discusses (Fregean) propositions. Later, dispositions — if I am so disposed.

Continue reading “Brentano and Whether Propositions are Intrinsically Intentional”

Brentano, Dretske and Whether There is Intentionality Below the Level of Mind

For Brentano, intentionality is the mark of the mental: (i) all mental phenomena are intentional, and (ii) all intentional phenomena are mental. This post considers whether there is intentionality below the level of conscious mind, intentionality that can exist without any connection, actual or potential, to conscious mind. If there is, then of course (ii) is false.

Continue reading “Brentano, Dretske and Whether There is Intentionality Below the Level of Mind”

Brentano and Three Types of Unconscious Intentionality

We saw that for Brentano, (i) all conscious states are intentional, and (ii) all intentional states are conscious. We also saw that felt pain is an apparent counterexample to (i): to feel pain is to be in a conscious state, a state that is not of or about anything. But there are also apparent counterexamples to (ii). Perhaps we should distinguish three classes of putattive counterexamples:

Continue reading “Brentano and Three Types of Unconscious Intentionality”

Brentano on the Mark of the Mental

1. What is the mark of the mental? Brentano took intentionality to be the mark of the mental, the criterion whereby physical and mental phenomena are distinguished. For Brentano, (i) all mental phenomena are intentional, (ii) all intentional phenomena are mental, and (iii) no mental phenomenon is physical. (Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874), Bk. II, Ch. 1.)

2. What is intentionality? ‘Intentionality’ is Brentano's term (borrowed from the Medievals) for that property of mental states whereby they are (non-derivatively) of, or about, or directed to, an object. The state of perceiving, for example is necessarily object-directed.  One cannot just perceive; if one perceives, then one perceives something. The same goes for intending (in the narrow sense), believing, imagining, recollecting, wishing, willing, desiring, loving, hating, judging, knowing, etc. Such mental states refer beyond themselves to objects that may or may not exist. Reference to an object is thus an intrinsic feature of mental states and not a feature they have in virtue of a relation to an existing object. This is why Brentano speaks of the "intentional in-existence of an object."  Mental states for Brentano are object-directed by their very nature as mental states: there is no need that  a particular state's object actually exist for that state to be intentional.  It follows that intentionality is not, strictly speaking, a relation.  For, necessarily,  if a relation obtains, then all its relata exist.  In the case of an intentional 'relation,' however, the object-relatum need not exist.

Continue reading “Brentano on the Mark of the Mental”

Why Brentano is Important

If Edmund Husserl is the father of phenomenology, Franz Brentano is its grandfather: his Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint, along with his lectures at the University of Vienna were powerful influences on the young Husserl who, though a Ph.D. in mathematics (under Weierstrass on the calculus of variations) abandoned mathematics for philosophy. (2) Brentano's dissertation under Trendelenburg, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, was a powerful impetus to Heidegger's ruminations on Being. (3) Brentano, as Gustav Bergmann points out, was "the first linguistic philosopher." (Realism, p. 234) Brentano, then, can be said to stand at the source of both the phenomenological and the analytic streams of thought as they developed in the 20th century.

The Supreme Enigma

Paul Brunton, Notebooks II, 4:

Every puzzle that fascinates innumerable persons and induces them to attempt its solution — be it mathematical and profound or ordinary and simple — is an echo on a lower level of the Supreme Enigma that is forever accompanying man and demanding an answer: What is he, whence and whither? The quester puts the problem into his conscious mind and keeps it there.

On Forming Societies at Faint Provocation

Paul Brunton, Notebooks II, 154, #56:

I am not enamoured overmuch of this modern habit, which forms a society at faint provocation. A man's own problem stares him alone in the face, and it is not to be solved by any association of men. Every new society we join is a fresh temptation to waste time.

Well said. Would Thoreau have joined the Thoreau Society? Merton the Merton Society? Would Groucho Marx have joined a club that would have him as a member?

Who Are the Oddballs?

Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, vol. II, The Quest (Burdett, NY: Larson Publications, 1986), p. 24:

We are regarded as odd people because we trouble our heads with the search for an intangible reality. But it never occurs to our critics that it is much more odd that they should go on living without pausing to inquire if there be any purpose in life at all.

Dubious Consolation for the Bald

Paul Brunton, who was bald, writes,

I take comfort in the continental proverb,"A hundred years hence we shall all be bald." (Notebooks, VIII, 202.)

I am not bald and the genetics of my lineage suggest the unlikelihood of my becoming bald. But the occasional dream reveals a subconscious anxiety. In one, I caught a glimpse via an array of mirrors of the beginning of a bald spot on the back of my head. But why should the thought of balding induce anxiety if not because the bald spot is a harbinger of the meatless skull each head is headed for?

Hair today, bone tomorrow.

Meditation as Disciplined Nonthinking: A Brunton Passage Exfoliated

‘Meditation’ has two main senses. The first refers to disciplined discursive thinking. Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy classically illustrates this first sense. If we use ‘thinking’ as short for ‘discursive thinking,’ we can say that the second sense of ‘meditation’ refers to disciplined nonthinking. Accordingly, meditation2 is an attempt to silence the discursive mind and enter into a nondiscursive state of awareness.

With this clarification in mind, we are ready to appreciate a passage from Paul Brunton:

Continue reading “Meditation as Disciplined Nonthinking: A Brunton Passage Exfoliated”

Why Be Consistent? Three Types of Consistency

A reader inquires:

This idea of the necessity to be consistent seems to be the logician's "absolute," as though being inconsistent was the most painful accusation one could endure. [. . .] What rule of life says that one must be absolutely consistent in how one evaluates truth? It is good to argue from first principles but it can also lead one down a rat hole.

Before we can discuss whether one ought to be consistent, we need to know which type of consistency is at issue. There are at least three types of consistency that people often confuse and that need to be kept distinct. I'll call them 'logical,' 'pragmatic,' and 'diachronic.' But it doesn't matter how we label them as long as we keep them separate.

Continue reading “Why Be Consistent? Three Types of Consistency”

Can a Black Man Vote Against Obamacare?

If a black congressman were to vote against a Democrat health care reform proposal, could he call himself a black man?  According to this source:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson on Wednesday night criticized Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.) for voting against the Democrats’ signature healthcare bill.

“We even have blacks voting against the healthcare bill from Alabama,” Jackson said at a reception Wednesday night. “You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.”

Brother Jesse apparently thinks that it is somehow inscribed into the very essence of being black that one be a leftist.

When we conservatives label libs and lefties as loons, it is this sort of preternatural idiocy that we have in mind. 

Revelation and Miracles

The question I want to pose and to which I do not have a firm answer — Nescio ergo blogo! — is whether every case of divine revelation is a miraculous event, or whether there are or can be cases of divine revelation that are not miraculous. To treat this question properly we need some preliminary definitions of key terms. After proposing some definitions I will suggest that they point in the direction of the possibility of non-miraculous revelations.

Continue reading “Revelation and Miracles”

Of Summertime in the Desert and Miracles

When cold water comes out of the 'hot' tap, and hot water out of the 'cold,' is it a miracle? No, it is summertime in the desert. (The pipe from the water heater runs through the air-conditioned house; the cold water line comes from outside where the temperature is in the triple Fahrenheit digits. So if I want nice cold water for a short time, I turn on the 'hot' tap.)

What appears to be an exception to an exceptionless regularity is not one at all, for the apparent exception is itself regular. The statement, "Hot from 'hot,' cold from 'cold'," has a counterexample. But it does not follow that the underlying regularity has an exception. For if the underlying regularity were to be captured in a complete statement, that statement would be seen to have no counterexamples since all the exceptions would have been built into it.

This is just a little 'warm-up' for a further series of posts on miracles.  And I just noticed that Frege (whom to have on one's side in a logic fight is like having Doc Holliday on one's side in a gunfight) seems to be on my side:

The word 'law' is used in two senses. When we speak of laws of morals or the state we mean regulations which must be obeyed but with which actual happenings are not always in conformity. Laws of nature are the generalization of natural occurrences with which the occurrences are always in accordance. (First paragraph of "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry")

A law may be more than an exceptionless regularity, but it is at least one.

More with Mason on Miracles

Franklin Mason e-mails (mid-June 2007):

I'd meant to get back to a little point you'd made a few days ago.

You said this: "I think of creation as an ongoing 'process': God sustains the world in being moment by moment. But at each moment, the totality of what exists is completely determinate: for each individual x and for each property P, either x has P or x has the complement of P. I would say that all and only the complete exists. Creation is bestowal of existence. So if at time t God is sustaining the world in existence, and what exists is complete, it is hard to see how God could add anything to it. The world at t is complete; anything added to it would precipitate a contradiction."

I agree with everything you say, but it doesn't seem to me to rule out the possibility of an input of new energy into space-time. It would of course be a contradiction if God were to both sustain the world at a time such that no new energy was anywhere present and, by a special act of will, bring it about at that time that there was new energy. But the creation of new energy at a time need not entail this contradiction. Rather, if there's new energy at time t, its existence is part of the complete world-whole at t; and God does not, at up to and at t, sustain the world-whole such that no new energy is present. Completeness does not imply a lack of novelty. Rather all that it implies is that novelty, when it occurs, is part of the world-whole at the time of its introduction and thereafter.

Continue reading “More with Mason on Miracles”