Going Deeper into “Intentionality”

Building on the last episode, we dive deeper into intentionality with the help of The Phenomenological Mind by Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher, and Joshua provides some insight from David Chalmer’s The Conscious Mind. There are three important issues which arise for the question of intentionality: (1) what is the relation of consciousness or phenomenality to intentionality, (2) to what extent can intentionality be naturalized or explained reductively by non-conscious or non-intentional causal mechanisms, and (3) how is the intentional mind related to reality or the world?

Chalmers’ distinction between the hard and easy problems of consciousness has been influential and clearly has some merit, yet the phenomenological approach to the issue resists separating consciousness from intentionality. The latter approach insists that the ‘first person viewpoint’ is not only a matter of ‘what it is like’ to experience something, but that the very intentional openness to various kinds of objectivities in the world (whether real, imagined, fictional, impossible, or ideal) is essential to mind and experience.

Despite some unexpected distractions (that’s right, three distinct kinds of milks in the grocery delivery), we made some progress on the first two questions. We will be tracing these issues out further as we go!