Intentional, How? On the Consequences of Some Medieval Views of Mental Acts

Brentano famously claimed that intentionality is one of the marks of the mental and that he found his concept of intentionality in the Middle Ages. It is now known that intentionality does not constitute a mark of the mental in medieval thought: scholars have shown that extra-mental things also display intentionality. In addition to this argument based on extra-mental things, I argue that some medieval theories do not present intentionality as a feature of all mental acts. Moreover, I argue that certain medieval theories differ in another way from Brentano's conception of intentionality: when presented with intentionally related objects (e.g., my past cognition of the rose), mental acts prove unable to focus freely on one or the other object (the act or the rose).