[extract from a longer conversation]
Me: Keeping going on the path cut through the forest of thought represented by the word "intentionality". The word has, I believe, a much longer history than Brentano and Husserl. Can you trace that path for me?
Claude: You're absolutely right to push further back, and the trail is a rewarding one. The word has roots deep in the medieval forest, and the concept has even older Aristotelian soil beneath that.
The long history of intentionality
Aristotle: form without matter
The story really begins with Aristotle's De Anima (On the Soul), written around 350 BCE. Aristotle is trying to explain something genuinely puzzling: how can the mind know the world without becoming the world? His answer is elegant. When you perceive something — say, a red object — your sense organ takes on the form of the thing (its redness, its shape) without taking on its matter. The eye becomes, in a sense, red — but it doesn't actually become the red thing. The wax receives the impression of the seal without receiving the gold or bronze of the seal itself. Form can be transferred from world to mind while the matter stays behind.
This is not yet called intentionality, but it is the founding intuition: the mind's relationship to the world is one of formal identity, not material identity. Mind reaches out to things and takes their shape without absorbing them. Everything that follows in the history of the concept is, in some sense, an elaboration of or argument with this idea.
The Islamic bridge: Avicenna and the internal senses
The Aristotelian tradition was taken up, transformed, and deepened by the great Islamic philosophers of the 10th and 11th centuries, above all by Ibn Sina — known in the Latin West as Avicenna. His Kitāb al-Nafs (Book of the Soul) introduced a concept that proved enormously influential: the Arabic word ma'nā, meaning something like "meaning" or "purport," which the Latin translators rendered as intentio.
For Avicenna, the external senses deliver sensory qualities — colour, sound, warmth. But the mind grasps something more: it grasps meanings that are not themselves sensory. His famous example is the sheep and the wolf. The sheep perceives the wolf not only as a grey, furry, moving object — it perceives it as dangerous. The dangerousness is not a sensory quality. It is an intention — something the estimative faculty (wahm) grasps that cannot be reduced to what the eyes and ears deliver. The sheep acts on this intention; it flees. The internal faculty that grasps intentions beyond sensory qualities is already doing something that we would recognise as relating mind to world in a non-sensory, meaning-laden way.
Avicenna also introduced the famous flying man thought experiment — imagine a person floating in void, with no sensory input at all. They would still be aware of themselves as existing, as a thinking subject. This awareness of one's own mental act — the reflexive dimension of intentionality — anticipates Husserl's later investigations by eight centuries.
The Scholastic synthesis: esse intentionale
When Avicenna's ideas reached the Latin West in the 12th and 13th centuries, they were taken up by the great Scholastic thinkers — above all Thomas Aquinas and later Duns Scotus — and woven into a systematic theory. The key technical distinction that emerged was between two kinds of being: esse naturale (natural being) and esse intentionale (intentional being).
When fire heats a piece of iron, the form of heat passes from fire to iron with natural being — the iron actually becomes hot; it changes materially. But when we perceive fire, the form of fire enters our sense organs with intentional being — we don't burst into flames. The warmth exists in the mind in a different mode: present, but present as a form received, not as a material transformation. This distinction — between a thing existing really in the world and existing intentionally (i.e., as the content of a mental act) — is precisely what Brentano would later call "intentional inexistence" and what Searle calls representational content.
The Scholastics also developed the distinction between first intentions and second intentions, which is worth pausing on for your research. A first intention is a direct mental act about a thing in the world — perceiving this particular face, thinking about this particular student's photograph. A second intention is a mental act about mental acts themselves — thinking about how we classify things, what categories we use, what concepts govern our perception. Grammar, logic, and philosophy all operate at the level of second intentions. The interesting thing for your project is that teachers' assumptions about their role operate almost entirely at the level of second intentions — they are beliefs about beliefs, frameworks for seeing rather than direct seeings. Surfacing assumptions through research interviews is essentially a move from first to second intention.
The word itself: intendere
The Latin intentio comes from intendere — to stretch toward, to aim at, to direct one's bow. The archer's arrow straining toward its target is the physical image underlying the philosophical concept. Mind stretches toward its object. It aims. There is already, in the etymology, a sense of reaching, of movement toward something not yet in hand. This directional character — what Husserl would later call the act-character of consciousness — is baked into the very word.
Descartes and the fork in the road
The early modern period is, in many ways, a wrong turn from which philosophy has been slowly recovering ever since. Descartes, in establishing the radical separation of mind (res cogitans) and world (res extensa), created what became known as the problem of the "veil of perception" — if mind and world are utterly different substances, how does the mind ever actually reach the world at all? His own answer was through God's guarantee, which later philosophers found increasingly unconvincing.
What Descartes did preserve, transformed, was the idea that ideas have what he called objective reality — a term he uses in the Scholastic sense: the reality of the thing as represented in the idea, as opposed to the formal reality of the thing as it exists in itself. This is exactly the medieval distinction between intentional and natural being, but now locked inside a Cartesian framework that makes the mind-world connection deeply problematic.
Kant, a century and a half later, tried to resolve the Cartesian impasse by arguing that the mind actively constitutes the objects of experience through its own categories and forms of intuition. The world as we know it is always already partly mind-shaped. This moves in the direction of intentionality — consciousness is always structuring the objects it encounters — but Kant's framework remains largely about the conditions of possible experience rather than the directedness of specific mental acts.
Brentano's reactivation
It was Franz Brentano who, in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), consciously retrieved the Scholastic term and made it the cornerstone of a new scientific psychology. Every mental phenomenon, he argued, is characterised by what the Scholastics called the intentional inexistence of an object — every mental act contains an object within itself, not as a separate thing it reaches out to touch, but as part of its own structure. Believing, desiring, perceiving, hating — all of these are of something. And that "of" is precisely intentionality.
Brentano's move was revolutionary because it made the mind-world relationship internal to the description of mental acts, rather than a mysterious bridge to be explained. You don't first have a mental act and then wonder how it reaches the world. The reaching-toward is constitutive of what a mental act is.
Husserl's deepening
Husserl, Brentano's student, found the master's framework too psychological — it still treated intentionality as a fact about individual minds rather than a structural feature of meaning and experience as such. Husserl's life's work was to describe the essential structures of intentional experience. He introduced the famous distinction between noesis (the act of intending) and noema (the intended content or sense). He explored how empty intentions (thinking about something absent) come to be filled through actual perception — the structure of fulfillment. He investigated time-consciousness, the body, intersubjectivity. His concept of horizon-intentionality — the way every focal perception is surrounded by a fringe of implicit, co-present background — is exactly what Baumgartner and Klawitter connect to Searle's Background.
Heidegger's transformation
Heidegger, Husserl's student, radically transformed the concept by insisting that the basic mode of human being is not the relation of a subject to an object, but being-in-the-world — a prior, pre-reflective entanglement with things that comes before any subject-object split. For Heidegger, intentionality in the Husserlian sense already presupposes too much — it still imagines a subject who then reaches toward objects. His concept of Dasein dissolves this: we are already "outside," already involved with things, already caring about the world, before consciousness arrives to represent it.
This matters for your research because it suggests that teachers' assumptions are not primarily ideas held in a mind — they are more like forms of involvement, ways of being-with students and equipment and situations, that precede and shape any explicit beliefs.
Merleau-Ponty's body
And then Merleau-Ponty brings it into the body. Motor intentionality — the body's pre-reflective directedness toward the world — means that a photographer doesn't first perceive a scene and then decide how to compose it. The trained body is already orienting, already framing, already reaching toward certain ways of seeing before conscious deliberation begins. The camera becomes what Merleau-Ponty calls a "habit-body" — an extension of the body schema that is aimed at the world in the same pre-cognitive way that a blind person's cane is aimed at the pavement.
The thread through all of this, for your research
What is consistent from Aristotle to Searle is the basic insight: mind is not sealed inside itself. It is constitutively about the world. But the progressive refinement of the concept reveals something increasingly useful for your project. The early tradition (Aristotle, Avicenna, Aquinas) focuses on how the form of things enters the mind. The modern tradition (Brentano, Husserl) focuses on the structure of intentional acts. The existential-phenomenological tradition (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty) insists that this aboutness is pre-theoretical and embodied, not primarily a matter of representation at all. And Searle adds: beneath all conscious intentional acts is a Background of skills, practices, and assumptions that are themselves not intentional but that silently determine what our intentional acts are about.
For a teacher of media production, this Background was formed over years of practice, education, and professional formation. It is not a set of beliefs they hold. It is a set of ways they see — orientations so fundamental they rarely surface as claims at all. Your research is, at its heart, an attempt to catch intentionality in the act of happening — to make the Background briefly visible by asking people to reflect on what they have always already assumed.
