Consciousness and Intentionality. Franz Brentano's Heritage in the Philosophy of Mind

The famous intentionality quote from Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint gave rise to many different glosses on how to understand what is meant by intentionality. Since Chisholm, Quine, and Davidson, the passage has often been referred to as making a claim about the irreducibility of the mental to the physical, turning Brentano’s thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental into a thesis about the peculiar idiom or vocabulary of the mental – a thesis about intensionality. However, in recent contributions to the philosophy of mind, the reception of Brentano’s philosophy of mind has departed to a large extent from this first reception of the intentionality thesis. Interestingly, his conception of intentionality and consciousness has been integrated into diverse and sometimes competing accounts of the mind:  higher-order theories of consciousness, self-representational accounts and varieties of representationalism and intentionalism often relate to Brentano’s conception of the mind. 

This conference will deal with these multiple intersections between Franz Brentano’s philosophy and the contemporary philosophy of mind, taking into consideration issues related – among others – to Brentano’s psychology, ontology, and theory of knowledge. Questions to be addressed may include – but are not limited to – phenomenal intentionality, internalism, non-conceptual content, disjunctivism, cognitive (and affective) phenomenology, self-awareness and time-consciousness. Contributions may take various angles: they may address for instance Brentano’s conception of the mental from a critical, historical and/or exegetical perspective, or they may propose original accounts of intentionality and consciousness inspired by – or critical of – Brentano’s insights on that matter.