Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Some of the most interesting and important metaphysics of the last 400 years addresses the nature of intentionality: our capacity to direct our activity by our beliefs about the things around us. Intentionality – the aboutness or representational character of thought – is the most fundamental feature of our mindedness. The metaphysics of intentionality during the early modern period has been structured by an overarching distinction that shows up in many more specific forms: body vs. mind, order of things vs. order of ideas, representings and representeds, causal vs. conceptual. A distinction qualifies as a dualism when it is drawn in a way that makes unintelligible the relations between what is distinguished, and this fundamental distinction in the metaphysics of intentionality has often threatened to become a dualism. The Cartesian variety had special features that seemed to be important for the difficulties faced by the whole picture. It understood the subjective in terms of the theoretical transparency, incorrigibility, or certainty of the mental, and its practical indefeasibility, dominion, or local omnipotence. (Descartes was impressed by the fact that one can be wrong about how things are , but not about how they seem , and that while it may not be in one's power to do something, it is always in one's power to try to do something.) This understanding of the subjective ... log in or subscribe to read full text