Category: Intentionality
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Thinking Meat?
Question: Is it my brain that feels and thinks when I feel and think? Argument A. Meat can't think. My brain is meat. Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain. A in Reverse: What thinks in me when I think is my brain. My brain is meat. Therefore, meat can…
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Nature, Signs, and Religious Experience
Reader P. J. offers us for delectation and analysis the following quotation from Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God: [Brother Lawrence] was eighteen at the time, and still in the world. He told me that it had all happened one winter day, as he was looking at a barren tree. Although the…
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The Primacy of the Intentional Revisited
Long-time reader writes, I was going through some of your posts from earlier this month (Belief, Designation, and Substitution, January 10, 2017) and was interested in seeing your comment that "[l]inguistic reference is built upon, and nothing without, thinking reference, or intentionality." . . . I have to say that your above sentence was…
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Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality: Some Points of Analogy
The influential Austrian philosopher Franz 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.…
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Can Kant Refer to God?
Ed Buckner raises this question, and he wants my help with it. How can I refuse? I'll say a little now, and perhaps more later. Kant was brought up a rationalist within the Wolffian school, but then along came David Hume who awoke him from his dogmatic slumber. This awakening begins his Critical period in…
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On the Status of Thomistic Common Natures
Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either material singulars or minds, and thus without reference to either mode of esse. The two modes…
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What Song Did the Sirens Sing and in What Key?
Ulysses had himself bound to the mast and the ears of his sailors plugged with wax lest the ravishing strains of the sea nymphs' song reach their ears and cause them to cast themselves into the sea and into their doom. But what song did the Sirens sing, and in what key? And what about the…
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On the Separation and Attachment of Soul and Body
I was purchasing shotgun ammo at a gun store a while back. The proprietor brought out a box of double-aught buckshot shells which he recommended as having "the power to separate the soul from the body." The proprietor was a 'good old boy,' not someone with whom a wise man initiates a philosophical discussion. But his colorful…
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London Ed on Geach on Intentional Identity
I am happy to see that Ed is back to blogging. It have reproduced his latest entry and added some comments. ……………….. Peter Geach (“Intentional Identity.” Journal of Philosophy 64, 627-32, reprinted in Logic Matters. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) argues that the following sentence can be true even if there are no witches, yet…
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Same Cause, Same Referent? More on the ‘Same God’ Problem
Tree and Scarecrow Suppose I point out a certain tree in the distance to Dale and remark upon its strange shape. I say, "That tree has a strange shape." Dale responds, "That's not a tree; that's a scarecrow!" Suppose we are looking at the same thing, a physical thing that exists in the external world…
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Edward Feser on Christians, Muslims, and the Reference of ‘God’
So far, Ed Feser's is perhaps the best of the Internet discussions of this hot-button question, a question recently re-ignited by the Wheaton dust-up, to mix some metaphors. Herewith, some notes on Feser's long entry. I am not nearly as philosophically self-confident as Ed or Lydia McGrew, so I will mainly just be trying to…
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Peter Geach on Worshipping the Right God
Having just read Peter Geach's "On Worshipping the Right God" (in God and the Soul, Thoemmes Press, 1994, pp. 100-116, orig. publ. 1969) I was pleased to discover that I had arrived by my own reasoning at some of his conclusions. On Christmas Eve I quoted Michael Rea: Christians and Muslims have very different beliefs…
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Posits or Inventions? Butchvarov and Geach on Intentionality
One philosopher's explanatory posit is another's mere invention. In his rich and fascinating article "Direct Realism Without Materialism" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. XIX, 1994, pp. 1-21), Panayot Butchvarov rejects epistemic intermediaries as "philosophical inventions." Thus he rejects sense data, sensations, ways of being appeared to, sense experiences, mental representations, ideas, images, looks, seemings, appearances,…
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Does Matter Think?
If matter (wholly material beings) could think, then matter would not be matter as currently understood. Can abstracta think? Sets count as abstracta. Can a set think? Could the set of primes contemplate itself and think the thought, I am a set, and each of my members is a prime number? Given what we know…
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Galen Strawson Versus Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness
(This is a repost from February 2013 slightly emended, except for an addendum added today. Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode just once do you?) ………………… A couple of days ago I had Nicholas Humphrey in my sights. Or, to revert to the metaphor of that…