Husserl, impure intentionalism, and sensory awareness

Corijn Van Mazijk

Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

pp. 333-351

in: Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 18 (2), 2019.

Abstract

Recent philosophy of mind has seen an increase of interest in theories of intentionality in offering a functional account of mental states. The standard intentionalist view holds that mental states can be exhaustively accounted for in terms of their representational contents. An alternative view proposed by Tim Crane, called impure intentionalism, specifies mental states in terms of intentional content, mode, and object. This view is also suggested to hold for states of sensory awareness. This paper primarily develops an alternative to the impure intentionalist account of states of sensory awareness. On the basis of Husserl's phenomenological work, I argue that a focus on intentionality at the level of sensory awareness is phenomenologically implausible. The final part offers an alternative functional account of sensory awareness based on what Husserl called "immanent association".

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Crane Tim