Abstract
In this paper, I want to further develop a line of reasoning which I first sought to articulate in an earlier paper bearing a similar title1. The basic problem in that paper was: does the theory of intentionality commit us to a dualistic ontology? Is the defence of intentionality a defence of Cartesian dualism or of mentalism? The prevailing attitudes towards this and various allied issues are pretty sharply divided, but there is also a basic confusion owing to: (a) a narrower concept of intentionality with which one generally operates which may roughly be defined in terms of Franz Brentano’s thesis along with Roderick Chisholm’s criteria superadded, and (b) a methodological belief that the critical problem is the dispensability or indispensability of intensional logic, as though the problem of intentionality is reducible to this issue, whereas in my view it should rather be the other way around. I sought to show that the intentionality thesis did not commit one to Cartesian dualism, that a certain form of pre-theoretical identity thesis is phenomenologically justified and also supported by the intentionality thesis. This pre-theoretical identity was contrasted with the theoretical identity posited by objectifying thought of a philosophical theory.
Originally appeared in S. Spicker (Ed.), Organism, Medicine, and Metaphysics (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978). Reprinted with permission, from D. Reidel Publisher, Dordrecht.
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Notes
J.N. Mohanty, “Intentionality and the Body-Mind Problem,” in: M. Chatterjee (Ed.), Contemporary Indian Philosophy, Series Two (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974), pp. 133–154.
Cf. E. Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness.
W. Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science I (1956). Reprinted in A. Marras (Ed.), Intentionality, Mind and Language (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1972). References are to this volume.
Sellars, Ibid., pp. 197–213.
Ibid., pp. 199–200.
J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 4 fn.
P.F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959), esp. Ch. III.
E. Husserl, Ideas, p. 164.
Ibid., p. 165.
U. Claesges (Ed.), Perspektiven transzendental-phänomenologischer Forschung: Für Ludwig Landgrebe zum 70. Geburtstag (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), p. 34.
E. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921–28, Iso Kern (Ed.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 57;
U. Claesges, Edmund Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 94.
The Noema is correlative to the specific act of objectification, and so what the noematic sense is depends upon how precisely, i.e., under what description, a body is being apprehended.
This is what Husserl seems to be driving at in Beilage XIV to his Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Also see Beilage XVI where he distinguishes between different levels of “Ausdruck”. Also on p. 65: “Jeder Ausdruck ist Leib für einen Sinn und ordnet sich damit der allgemeinen Leiblichkeit ein als ausgezeichneter Sinnträger…”.In fn. 2, on p. 65, Husserl compares “Leib” with the written text as “objective spirit.”
H. Plessner, Laughing and Crying, transi. J.S. Churchill and M. Grene (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 43, 45.
“The very first of all cultural objects, and the one by which all the rest exist, is the body of the other person as the vehicle of a form of behavior.”
Claesges (Ed.), loc. cit., p. 34.
The place of Leiblichkeit in the structure of Husserlian transcendental subjectivity has been ably worked out by A. Lingis in A. Lingis, “Intentionality and Corporeity,” in: A.T. Tymieniecka (Ed.), Analecta Husserliana I (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971).
See also L. Landgrebe, Phänomenologie und Geschichte (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1967).
Plessner, loc. cit., pp. 32–38.
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Mohanty, J.N. (1985). Intentionality and the Mind/Body Problem. In: The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy. Phaenomenologica, vol 98. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5049-8_9
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