Jaegwon Kim and the Brentanian Heritage in Analytic Philosophy of Mind

considerations on the Representationalism

Abstract

As a rule, most analyses of the thesis of intentionality, which was introduced into contemporary philosophy by Franz Brentano in his work Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), adopt the perspectives established by philosophers of the phenomenological tradition. Certainly, such approaches find good justification in the fact that phenomenology figures among the main currents of thought developed from the project inaugurated by Brentano in 1874. However, several other thinkers belonging to other currents of thought, which certainly were no less relevant to the current stage of contemporary philosophy, analyzed the Brentanian thesis of intentionality and developed their respective research programs from perspectives different from those of the philosophers of the phenomenological tradition. Among them were Kasimir Twardowski, Alois Höfler, Alexius Meinong, Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Sigmund Freud, among others. In addition, from the second half of the last century onwards and in the wake of a non-phenomenological tradition, some thinkers belonging to the new current defined as philosophy of mind, developed within the analytic tradition, put the Brentanian thesis of intentionality back at the center of their philosophical analyses. The fundamental question established by this tradition was opened to debate in the following terms: “is intentionality the mark of the mental?” Since then, the way this fundamental question has been interpreted, as well as the different answers it has received, diverge radically depending on the presuppositions (ontological and epistemological) assumed by the research programs of the philosophers of mind involved in the debate. Given this open horizon, this paper is divided into three parts: (i) it presents in a systematic way the fundamental points of Fréchette's (2021) analysis, which describes the distancing of the Standard interpretation of phenomenological orientation by tracing the route of the reception of the Brentanian program by the analytic tradition of the philosophy of mind; (ii) it describes the way Jaegwon Kim, in his book Philosophy of Mind (2011/2019), analyzes the Brentanian thesis of intentionality with the purpose of presenting a supposed consensual answer in the philosophy of mind to the question "is intentionality the mark of the mental?". The development of parts (i) and (ii) will explicit the background for the support of the following hypothesis: Brentano would have good arguments to refute Kim's analysis of his thesis of intentionality, because at least one fundamental presupposition in the definition of intentionality is taken by Kim in a mistaken sense, namely presentation (Vorstellung), as Boccaccini (2023) maintained. Finally, (iii) my thesis defended in the last part of this paper assumes, therefore, that Kim incurs the trap of the multiplicity of senses of the term Vorstellung and, therefore, presents an erroneous analysis of the Brentanian thesis of intentionality sustained in representationalism, which prevents the understanding of the definition of the Brentanian concept of phenomenon (physical and psychic) in the terms of his 4th Habilitation thesis.