Husserl Ibn Sina

Ibn Sn and Husserl on Intention and IntentionalityAuthor(s): Marina Paola Banchetti-RobinoSource: Philosophy East and West, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 71-82Published by: University of Hawai'i PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1399863 .Accessed: 18/07/2014 12:37

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PhilosophyEast and West.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.126.138.119 on Fri, 18 Jul 2014 12:37:27 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

IBN SINA AND HUSSERL ON INTENTION AND INTENTIONALITY

Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino Department of Philosophy, Florida Atlantic University

The concepts of intention and intentionality have enjoyed a long history within Western philosophy. They were particularly important notions in the Christian, Jew- ish, and Islamic philosophical traditions of the Middle Ages and regained philosophical importance in the twentieth century, particularly in the writings of Edmund Husserl. This essay proposes to confront medieval philosophy with contemporary phenomenology by conducting a comparative study of the concepts of intention and intentionality as they appear in the philosophical works of the Islamic philosopher and physician Ibn STna (latinized as Avicenna) and the phenomenological philosopher and mathematician Edmund Husserl.

There are profound differences between Ibn STna's and Husserl's accounts of intention and intentionality, and it is particularly interesting to examine the influences and the specific philosophical concerns that helped to shape each philosopher's unique conception of intentions and intentional processes and of intentionality's relation to consciousness. To this end, I shall first examine Ibn STna's naturalistic conception of intention and how it was, in many ways, influenced by the tradition of the Baghdad school of philosopher-physicians and their understanding of the 'internal senses'. After this I shall examine Husserl's anti-naturalistic stance regarding intention and intentionality and how this stance was both influenced by and, in part, a response to Franz Brentano's psychologistic account of 'intentional in-existence'. Lastly, I shall argue that, in their approach to the concept of intentional meanings and of intentionality, Ibn Sina and Husserl were, in many ways, strongly influenced by the professional culture to which each belonged, that of the physician and the mathematician, respectively. After this I shall argue for the superiority of the Husserlian transcendentalist view over the Avicennian naturalistic view.

Ibn STna's Account of Intention and Intentionality

Although many philosophers today, even those who do not consider themselves phenomenologists, are somewhat familiar with Husserl's theory of intentionality, they are less familiar with Ibn STna's understanding of the concept of intention, unless, of course, they are medievalists or have a certain degree of competence in medieval philosophy. Therefore, I shall begin by examining the concept of intention as it appears in the work of Ibn STna, particularly in his psychology and his metaphysics, as found in the Kitab al-Najat and the Kitab al-Shiff'.

The theory of intention elaborated by Ibn STna in his accounts of psychology,

Philosophy East & West Volume 54, Number 1 January 2004 71-82 71 ? 2004 by University of Hawai'i Press


epistemology, and metaphysics was transmitted to Scholastic philosophy through the work of Thomas Aquinas. In Ibn Sina's discussion of Being and substance,

Being is the proper and primary object of metaphysics.... Being per se is substance; within this [Ibn STna] distinguishes separate and material forms and matter, which is a substance of inferior order.

... [Ibn SiTn] reaches the conclusion that one thing can legitimately exist in the spirit and be missing from external objects; he calls this type of existence intentional being [or intentional existence].... In his theory of knowledge, [Ibn STnd] uses [the concept of intention] to explain the relation between object and subject. (Emphasis mine)' In chapter 3 of the Najdt, titled "Internal Sense," we read the following account

of intention: There are some faculties of internal perception which perceive the form of the sensed things, and others which perceive the 'intention' thereof. Some faculties, again, can both perceive and act while others only perceive and do not act. Some possess primary perception, others secondary perception. The distinction between the perception of the form and that of the intention is that the form is what is perceived both by the inner soul and the external sense; but the external sense perceives it first and then transmits it to the soul, as for example, when the sheep perceives the form of the wolf, i.e., its shape, form, and colour. This form is certainly perceived by the inner soul of the sheep, but it is first perceived by its external sense. As for the intention, it is a thing which the soul perceives from the sensed object without its previously having been perceived by the external sense, just as the sheep perceives the intention of harm in the wolf, which causes it to fear the wolf and to flee from it, without harm having been perceived at all by the external sense. Now, what is first perceived by the sense and then by the internal faculties is the form, while what only the internal faculties perceive without the external sense is the intention.2

Why does the sheep, through its internal sense, perceive hostility in the wolf? According to one reading of this text, the intention in itself is not perceived by the external senses, and one cannot point to anything specifically perceived by the external senses that displays the intention. There is, however, something about the form (sura) that is perceived by the external senses and which, in turn, leads to the perception of intention by the internal senses:

Sensible forms are ... corporeal qualities that affect the sensory organs in such a way that they are received by virtue of their similitude. This is the reason for which they are received first by the external senses and are then transmitted to the internal senses. But the 'meanings' that these objects signify are not such corporeal qualities but, rather, qualities or values that are latent in the sensible forms, such as the quality of being agreeable or disagreeable, good or bad, sympathetic or non-sympathetic, etc.... For example, the animal, seeing a yellow liquid that is honey, judges that it is sweet and proceeds to taste it. The sweetness that is seized by this judgment is not sensible, although this quality in itself is sensible, because it has not yet actually been tasted by the animal.... The sheep, perceiving the figure, the howls and the scent of a wolf, judges that he is ferocious and dangerous, and runs away from it immediately. It is not merely that it seizes the living object by simply accepting certain of its vital qualities, but also [that it seizes the object] by the attribution of these qualities to the object.3

72 Philosophy East & West


According to Ibn STna, the faculty of estimation is responsible for the perception of intentions and, thus, for intentionality. This faculty is part of Ibn Sina's rather complex scheme of the 'internal senses' that he inherited, in part, from the Baghdad school of philosopher-physicians. According to this scheme, there are two types of sensible objects that can be perceived by the internal senses, and there are two types of faculties, within the internal senses, that perceive these sensible objects. The two types of faculties of internal sense are the receptive faculty and the retentive faculty. Ibn Sina explains that these two faculties are distinct from the fact that reception requires a malleable substrate since, when receiving a form, a change must take place in the substrate. On the other hand, retention requires a stable substrate since retaining a form requires a changeless substrate.

The two types of sensible objects are sensible forms and intentions. We must understand that, in this context, 'sensible' does not mean 'sensuous', that is, perceivable by the external senses, but merely perceivable by the internal senses. This is why Ibn Sina can refer to intentions as 'sensible objects' even though, as established in the Najat, intentions are never perceived or perceivable by the external senses. Intentions, according to Ibn STna, are what sensible form 'means' or 'signifies' to the percipient subject. Thus, to return to the example used by Ibn STnd, the sensible form of the wolf 'signifies' hostility to the sheep. Although the sheep does not literally 'see' hostility in the wolf's eyes, the sensible form of the expression in the wolf's eyes 'means', to the sheep, that the wolf is hostile. The ferociousness of the wolf is latent in its appearance and comportment. However, because an intention is not itself a sensuous quality of the object, although it may be conveyed to the percipient through a sensory faculty, it does not affect any sense organ at the time during which the judgment is being made.

In the scheme of internal senses, there is a faculty of the receptive type and a faculty of the retentive type that handle each type of sensible object. Common sense is the faculty that receives (or perceives) sensible forms, whereas the formative (or retentive) imagination is the faculty that retains sensible forms. The estimative faculty (wahm) is the faculty that receives (or perceives) intentions, whereas the memorative faculty retains intentions. The proper objects of the estimative faculty are, then, ma'nan or intentions. In nonhuman animals, the estimative faculty is somewhat limited. They can, as the example of the sheep illustrates, perceive non-sensual aspects of the environment "that exceed the perceptual capacities of the [external] senses and the imagination."4 However, in human animals, the estimative faculty also has cognitive functions that it does not have in nonhuman animals. Thus, in human animals the estimative faculty and the intellective faculty are co-present.5

Unlike Alexander of Aphrodisias and Plotinus, who understood the idea of perception non-physiologically, Ibn Sina rematerializes perception, and, in doing this, he also indirectly materializes his account of intention. As has already been established above, for Ibn STnma intentions are closely connected to sense perceptions because they are dependent on them and, for him, sense perception contains a clearly physiological and materialistic element: "although the estimative faculty has non- sensible intentions as its proper objects, it only possesses those intentions when they

Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino 73


are conjoined with particular sensible forms represented in the imagination, thereby compelling estimation to 'impede the existence of things which cannot be imagined and are not imprinted in [the imagination], and to refuse to assent to them.'"'6 As we have seen above, however, there is nothing in the imagination that is not first received through the perception of sensible forms.

Now, perception, for Ibn STna, occurs when common sense receives sensible forms, that is, form without matter. This account of perception is directly inherited from Aristotle, for whom the reception of form without matter was interpreted by the Scholastics as 'intentional in-existence'. Once the form without matter has been received by common sense, the imaginative faculty retains these sensible forms. Thus, the estimative faculty receives intentions on the basis of the sensible forms, or form without matter, that are received by common sense and that are retained by the imagination. This, then, establishes the dependence of the faculty of estimation, or of intentionality, on sense perception. "[F]or all five senses, the reception of form without matter is interpreted as making the perceiver become like the form of the thing perceived.... Although the form is received stripped of its original matter, the abstraction from matter in sense-perception is not so complete as in the estimative faculty or in the intellect."7 Therefore, since it can be shown that, for Ibn STna, there is a physiological element to the reception and retention of the sensible forms of external objects, one would have to conclude that intentionality has, ultimately, physiological origins.

At this point, I would like to examine the cultural influences that helped shape Ibn STna's account of perception, cognition, and intentionality. However, rather than focus on ethnic culture, I shall focus on the professional culture that helped to shape Ibn Sina's understanding of these concepts. Although there are Neoplatonic influences in Ibn STna's conception of the intellect, his account of other mental faculties, such as perception, is not Neoplatonic. However, one should not extract from this that Ibn STna's account of perception is entirely Aristotelian. Notwithstanding the fact that his account of perception was, in some ways, inherited from Aristotle and the Peripatetic philosophical tradition, the evidence suggests that Ibn STna's naturalistic, psychologistic, and quasi-physiological account of perception and other mental faculties was, in many ways, influenced by his own training as a physician and by his attempt to respond to and mediate between the physicians' account of mental faculties and the philosophers' account.

Greatly influential in Ibn STna's medical training and in his understanding of the mental faculties, especially that of perception, was the Baghdad school of philosopher-physicians. This medical circle represented the 'afterlife' of the Baghdad Peripatetics, and they were "a constant feature of the intellectual life of medieval Islam."8 They were not only prominent physicians but also translators and students of the work of Aristotle, Galen, and Hippocrates, and it is out of this cultural tradition of the philosopher-physician that Ibn STna emerged.

The physicians' account of the mental faculties was much more physiological than the account to be found in the Aristotelian tradition. We find for example, in Ibn Luka, the following purely physiological conception of the spirit. "The spirit ...



is a subtle substance that emanates throughout the body. Arising from the heart, it directs itself in the arteries and gives birth to life, to breath, and to arterial pulsation and, arising from the brain, it passes through the nerves and produces sensation and movement."' Ibn Laka views the spirit as an intermediary between the body and the soul. It is through the spirit that the soul communicates life and sensation to the body. Thus, although he does not endorse a materialist conception of the soul, Ibn LOka does endorse a materialist conception of the spirit as the intermediary between soul and body.10 One could speculate that Ibn LOik might be trying to avoid the obvious philosophical and physical problems associated with the notion of interaction between a material and an immaterial substance. The problem, however, is not successfully avoided by adding a third and material substance as an intermediary, since this material substance called 'spirit' must also interact with the immaterial soul, thereby resurrecting the problem of interaction.

According to the physicians of the Baghdad school,

the faculties of the soul are regarded only with reference to the bodily organs in which they reside and not with reference to the variety of function which they perform, for physicians ... concern themselves with faculties of the soul only in so far as a hindrance in the functioning can be traced to an injury in the bodily organs in which they are located. Consequently, if two functionally different faculties of the soul reside in one bodily organ, then physicians regard it as one faculty, inasmuch as any injury in that organ will affect the two faculties alike."1

Thus, the physicians made no distinction, for example, between the receptive and the retentive types of faculty of internal sense. Ibn Sina seems to want to balance the account given by the medical circle and that given by the philosophers, such as al-Kindi and al-Farabi. It is clear that in his scheme of faculties of the internal senses Ibn Sina tries to break away from the strict physiological account of the Baghdad school of philosopher-physicians. He does this by considering the receptive faculties as distinct from the retentive faculties by focusing on their functional differences. He appeals to syllogistic logic to make his argument. Only a malleable substrate can acquire the nonmaterial sensible form that is received in perception. Only a stable substrate can retain the form after it has been acquired. A substrate cannot be both malleable and stable. Therefore, the receptive faculty and the retentive faculty must be distinct in kind, one malleable and the other stable. QED. Furthermore, his account of intentions is that they are 'meanings' or 'significations', abstract and non- sensory aspects of the external environment that, although they accompany sense perception, are not themselves perceived by the external senses.

However, there is also evidence in several of Ibn Sina's writings, especially in his medical magnum opus, the Canon, but also in ShifX' and Kafet, that he does not completely break away from the physician's account. In these works, Ibn STna places wahm, or the estimative or intentional faculty, in a specific bodily location, at the end of the middle hollow of the brain.12 Thus, to follow the reasoning of the medical circle, any injury to this part of the bodily organ would affect the animal's ability to receive intentions. Therefore, a sheep whose middle hollow of the brain had been



somehow injured to the point of affecting the estimative faculty, but without any injury to any other part of the brain, would conceivably be able to perceive the wolf but would be unable to detect hostility in the animal. This would then lead to the conclusion, unacceptable to someone like Edmund Husserl, that there could be an almost perfectly functioning consciousness without intentions or intentionality.

Husserl's Account of Intention and Intentionality

Husserl's doctrine of intentionality is a highly sophisticated and developed version of the frequently held epistemological position that "the human mind makes substantial contributions to the specific structure of what appears before it, so that experience is construed to be a complex of data given externally and organizational princi- ples supplied internally."13 Once one has suspended all ontological commitments, assumptions, and presuppositions and once contingencies are bracketed, the structure of consciousness is revealed in its essence as being intentional. Husserl tells us that all consciousness is necessarily actionally 'directed' toward an 'object'. In other words, all consciousness is necessarily consciousness of something. It is this pecu- liarity of mental processes that is known as intentionality.

Husserl also refers to intentionality as 'egological constitution' for the reason that the intentional act is one in which subjective consciousness synthesizes the sensuous data that is given to it and bestows sense or meaning upon it. The act through which the ego bestows meaning upon its object is called the noetic act, and the meaningful object or 'meaning' that is constituted through this act is called a noema. Thus, for Husserl, the intentional object and the noema are one and the same. In Ideas I, for example, Husserl tells us:

Like perception, every intentive mental process-just this makes up the fundamental part of intentionality-has its "intentional Object," i.e., its objective sense. Or, in some other words: to have sense or "to intend to" something [etwas "im Sinne zu haben"], is the fundamental characteristic of all consciousness which, therefore, is not just any mental living [Erlebnis] whatever, but is rather a (mental living> having sense, which is "noetic." (Emphasis in original)14

This actional Ego-advertence is not to be found in every mental event; that is, not every mental event is directed or intentional. 'Pain', for example, is a mental event that is not itself intentional. But, every mental process can, within itself, include intentionality. Husserl calls those mental events that are not intentional apperceptions, whereas those mental events that are intentional are called inner or outer perceptions. Thus, apperceptions are states, whereas perception and all actionally directed mental events are not states but mobile activities. The essential dynamic of an intentional event is that it projects itself toward something, its intended object. Although Husserl distinguishes between apperception and perception, he claims that all mental processes, even those which are not themselves intentive, are ultimately born in and borne by intentionality. This is due to the fact that Ego unification itself occurs through an intentional act, the most fundamental of all intentional acts, for



without it there would be no unified stream of consciousness. Meaning must, then, be bestowed upon the Ego before meaning can be bestowed upon the world of experience. Thus, an apperception like 'pain', although it is not itself a mental event characterized by intentionality, is experienced by an Ego that is unified and is, therefore, the product of an intentional act.

Consciousness, for Husserl, is thus immersed in intentionality. Consciousness is intentionality. For there to be mental events, there must be an Ego serving as the subject of these mental events, and, in order for there to be an Ego, there must an intentional, constitutive act capable of synthesizing and unifying the stream of consciousness. Thus, it is absurd to speak of any conscious state or mental event as being, in no manner whatsoever, founded on intentional acts, for the empirical or psychological self is itself the product of the transcendental Ego's act of constitutive synthesis.

Following Husserl, we can draw the following conclusions. Because we are not speaking of the empirical Ego but of the transcendental Ego, and because we have bracketed all ontological commitments to or assumptions about a material world external to the Ego, we realize that intentionality cannot be reduced to brain states or located in a particular brain or part of the brain. Intentionality does not presup- pose the existence of a physical, material brain. Intentionality only presupposes consciousness, and consciousness presupposes intentionality. The two are, in essence, one and the same. For as long as there is consciousness, there is intentionality. And, when there is no longer intentionality, there is no longer consciousness. Although we understand that, as a matter of fact, only beings with a nervous system and a brain have consciousness, the essential characteristic of consciousness, that is, intentionality, is not reducible to the brain itself or to any particular part of the brain. Thus, no damage can be done to the brain that could lead to non-intentional conscious states. A non-intentional conscious state, for Husserl, is a contradiction in terms. The only possible damage to the brain that could destroy intentionality is damage that destroys consciousness altogether.

It is clear that Husserl's concept of intentionality was not born in a void but was inherited, rather, from the long tradition that preceded him. The tradition through which the concept of intentionality was transmitted from Aristotle to the twentieth century is a long and complex one. Ibn STnd is but one of the many philosophers through which this concept passed from its origins in Aristotelian psychology through Scholasticism on its way to contemporary philosophy. It is not the purpose of this essay to trace this long history, which has already been successfully addressed by other authors.15 Suffice it to say that, after the Scholastic period in medieval philosophy, the concept of intentionality existed in semi-obscurity until 1874 when Franz Brentano, in his Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, "[re]introduced into the philosophy of mind the seminal idea of an intentional object."''16 Brentano tell us:

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call,



though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.'7

In Brentano, the definition of intentional inexistence remains virtually un- changed from the definition found in the Scholastics. According to Brentano, the feature that distinguishes mental phenomena from physical phenomena is that they are directed toward objects that have intentional inexistence.18 It is this aspect of Brentano's theory that greatly influenced Husserl, for Husserl also concludes that mental events and consciousness as a whole are essentially distinguished by their intentional character, that is, their directedness toward intentional objects.

The concept of an intentional object that we find in Brentano's work, however, is very different from that to be found in Husserl. After inheriting the concept of intentionality from Brentano, Husserl clearly broke away from Brentano's account. Although Brentano's account is not naturalistic in the same way as Ibn STna's, Bren- tano's conception of intentional inexistence is a theory about the nature of the psychological Ego, that is, of empirical consciousness and, therefore, remains psychologistic and naturalistic. Husserl, as a mathematician who embraces the Bolzanian requirement for a pure logic, is, on the other hand, concerned with developing an account of consciousness and intentionality that is nonpsychologistic, nonnaturalistic, and non-reductionistic. Only such a nonnaturalistic account could, according to Husserl, provide us with a phenomenology that could serve as the truly scientific foundation for logic, mathematics, and the empirical sciences. Logic, as Husserl claims, is not concerned with the vague laws of empirical psychology but with pre- cise and universal laws.19 Understanding that these laws are not merely descriptive and contingent features of the empirical world but are, rather, theoretical laws holding for the domain of ideal meanings, Husserl seeks to overcome the naturalism, empiricism, and reductionism that, he believes, were responsible for the emergence of logical psychologism. According to logical psychologism, there is nothing a priori, objective, or necessary about logic, mathematics, and meanings. To embrace logical psychologism is to embrace a view of logical and mathematical laws as contingently true descriptions of how empirical subjects happen to think. Psychological facts serve as the foundation of logical laws. Logical psychologism, according to Husserl, inevitably leads to relativism and skepticism, and logical psychologism emerges from naturalism. "Naturalism, in the sense in which Husserl understands it, seems ... to be nothing more than one of those many residual tendencies all of which con- verge in the overlooking of the act in favor of the object."20

It is within the framework of his reflective and 'transcendental' phenomenological method and of the variously stated theory of intentionality that Husserl offers



his own solution to the problems of the theory of evidence, truth, and ontology. To discuss further how the phenomenological method and its discovery of intentionality put the nail in the coffin of psychologism is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that since the laws of logic and mathematics are the product of intentional acts of the transcendental Ego and since they are not descriptive and contingent, intentionality and intentional acts could never be conceived in naturalistic, reductionistic, or physiological terms. To conceive it in those terms would undermine Husserl's entire anti-psychologistic foundational project.

Comparative Discussion of the Avicennian and Husserlian Conceptions of Intention and Intentionality

It is clear that the medical culture of which Ibn STna was a part greatly influenced his philosophical work, particularly his views on the nature of mind, perception, and intentionality. Although in Ibn Sina we find an attempt to mediate between the strictly physicalistic account of mental activity found in the medical circle and the nonphysicalistic account found in the philosophical circles, certain remnants of physicalism, reductionism, and naturalism still linger in many of his writings, even those that are philosophical rather than medical.

It is also clear that Husserl's background as a mathematician and his desire to ground mathematics and the empirical sciences in a truly scientific philosophy led him to the rejection of psychologism and naturalism and to the development of a concept of intentionality as not reducible to physiological states, since physicality itself, and all other assumptions of the natural attitude, are bracketed prior to the discovery of intentionality.

I wish to argue that Husserl's account of intentionality is far superior to Ibn Sina's, although Ibn Sina's contribution to the theory of intentionality is certainly important both in itself and for its influence on the Scholastic notion of 'intentional inexistence'. As we have seen, it is from this Scholastic notion that Brentano resur- rects the concept of intentionality that will later allow Husserl to give us a new way of understanding consciousness. Although in both Ibn STna and Husserl intention refers to the 'meaning' of the perceived object, Husserl takes this notion much further than Ibn STna precisely because he de-materializes and de-naturalizes the concepts of intention and intentionality and moves away from a substantive theory of consciousness. For Husserl, consciousness (or mind, soul) is no longer a substance but an activity, and this activity is intentional. Consciousness bestows meaning upon the world rather than finding meaning already in the world. Thus, the intentional object is a product of the constitutive activities of consciousness and of its directness. For Ibn STna, on the other hand, the meaning signified by the object, although not a corporeal quality of the object, is latent in the sensible form of the object. Thus, although for Husserl the sheep constitutes the wolf-as-perceived, and this includes the wolf's ferociousness, for Ibn STna the wolf's ferociousness is latent in its appearance and comportment.

Ibn STna's account is naturalistic for two reasons. First of all, his account of



intentions is dependent on his account of perception, and his account of perception suffers from a materialism that is inherited from the medical tradition to which Ibn Sina himself contributed greatly. Second, his account of intentions focuses on the object rather than on the act. Intentions or 'meanings' are latent in the object perceived, although they are not themselves sensuous qualities of the object. They are in the object, rather than being the product of the subject's actions. This is one of the aspects of naturalism to which Husserl himself objected. As was recently stated by Ronald McIntyre in his critique of Fred Dretske's 'representational naturalism', "senses are not properties of the objects we intend.... [T]he sense belongs to the content of the experience, while the properties belong to the object. An act is intentional by virtue of having a sense or content, even if there is no object that 'sat- isfies' this sense."21 It seems that Dretske, at least in this respect, is guilty of thinking of intentions or 'senses' in a way similar to Ibn STna. Thus, the same criticism that McIntyre raises against Dretske could also be raised against Ibn STna. For both Dretske and Ibn Sina, "senses are properties of the sort that physical objects have. For Husserl, they are abstract 'contents' of intentional thoughts or experiences,"22 intentional thoughts being the acts that constitute these very senses.

Husserl does not make either of the naturalistic mistakes that we find in Ibn STna. First of all, Husserl avoids physicalistic reductions of intentionality, perception, cognition, and other mental faculties by suspending the natural attitude in which the existence of the material world and the psychological empirical self are taken for granted. Second, Husserl focuses on intentional acts of the subject rather than objects. Husserl is able to arrive at his conception of intentionality precisely by bracketing or suspending all assumptions about a material world, a physiological self, and a psychological empirical self. In doing this, Husserl isolates consciousness as such and discloses its activities. From this, Husserl understands that, even if one suspends belief in an extramental reality, experience-as-such has meaning. Although Husserl is not embracing a conception of consciousness as disembodied, he never- theless realizes that meaning must not come from outside consciousness. It is not latent in some extramental reality. It is not given to a passive consciousness. Rather, it is constituted by an active consciousness. Husserl is, thus, able to divorce himself from both Brentano's and his own early psychologism and naturalism, a psychologism and naturalism that, unfortunately, clearly permeate Ibn STna's understanding of intentional meaning and of intentionality.

It is in these and many other respects that transcendental phenomenology pro- vides an account of mental events-and particularly of intentionality-that is superior to that provided by naturalistic theories. It is clear that both Husserl and Ibn Sina, in their development of an account of mental events and intentions, were greatly influenced by their training, respectively, as a mathematician and a physician. The physician was drawn toward naturalism because of a need to locate mental functions in a particular part of the brain in order to explain injuries to those functions. The risk of this, however, is to fall into a reductionistic program that is not able to explain the quality and meaningfulness of our mental life. The mathematician Hus- serl, on the other hand, was drawn toward a transcendental account because of his



desire to escape psychologism. In doing so, Husserl was successful in providing us with an account of experience and mental life that is much richer than the naturalistic account found in Ibn SiTn.

Notes

1 - Avicenna, Sobre Metafisica (Antologia), trans. from the Arabic, with an introd. and notes, by Miguel Cruz Hernandez (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1950), p. 37. The original text reads as follows:

El ser es el objeto primario y proprio de la metaffsica.... El ser per se es la sustancia; dentro de esta distingue las formas separada y material y la materia, que es la sustancia de orden inferior.

... Ilega Avicena a la conclusi6n de que una cosa puede existir legitimamente en el espiritu y faltar en los objetos exteriores; a esta existencia le llama ser intencional.... En su teorfa del conocimiento la usa para explicar la relaci6n entre los objetos y el sujeto.

2 - Avicenna, "Concerning the Soul," in F. Rahman, Avicenna's Psychology: An English Translation of Kitab Al-Najat, Book II, Chapter VI with Historico- Philosophical Notes and Textual Improvements to the Cairo Edition (Oxford University Press, 1952; reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press, 1981), p. 30.

3 - Noriko Ushida, Etude Comparative de la Psychologie d'Aristote, d'Avicenne et de St. Thomas d'Aquin (Tokyo: Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, 1968), p. 158. The original text reads as follows:

Les formes sensibles sont ... des qualites corporelles qui affectent les organes sensoriels en sorte qu'elles sont revues

en vertu de leur similitude. C'est pourquoi elles sont revues en premier lieu par les sens externes, et ensuite elles sont transmises aux sens internes. Mais les sens que les objets signifient ne sont pas telles qualites corporelles, mais plutot des qualites ou des valeurs qui sont latentes dans les formes sensibles, telles que les qualites agreables ou desagreables, bonne ou mauvaise, sympathique ou antipathique, etc.... Par exemple, I'animal, en voyent un liquide jaune qui est du miel, juge qu'il est doux et va le gouiter. La douceur saisie par ce jugement n'est pas sensible, quoique cette qualite en elle-meme soit sensible, car elle n'est pas encore gout~e actuellement par I'animal.... La brebis, en percevant la figure, les cris et I'odeur d'un loup, juge qu'il est f6roce et dangereux, et le fuit tout de suite. Ce n'est pas seulement qu'elle saisit I'objet vivant par la simple acceptation de certaines de ses qualites vitales, mais aussi par I'attribution de ces qualites 'a I'objet.

4 - Deborah L. Black, "Imagination and Estimation: Arabic Paradigms and Western Transformations," Topoi 19 (1) (2000): 60.

5 - Ibid. 6 - Ibid., p. 61. Black is here quoting Avicenna, Al-Shiff': AI-Nafs (Healing: De

anima), in Avicenna's "De Anima," Being the Psychological Part of Kitab al- Shifa', ed. F. Rahman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 4.1, p. 166.



7 - Richard Sorabji, "From Aristotle to Brentano: The Development of the Concept of Intentionality," in Aristotle and the Later Tradition, ed. Henry Blumenthal and Howard Robinson, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary volume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 236.

8 - F. E. Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1968), p. 163.

9 - Abderrahman Tlili, Contribution a I'Etude de la psychologie a travers la phi- losophie avicennienne, preface de Roger Deladriere (Tunis: Universite de Tunis I, 1995), p. 78. The original text reads as follows: L'esprit ... est une substance subtile repandue dans le corps. S'elevant du coeur, elle se dirige dans les arteres et donne naissance a la vie, a la respiration et a la pulsation arterielle et, partant du cerveau, elle passe dans les nerfs et produit la sensation et le mouvement.

10- Ibid., pp. 79-80. 11 - Harry Austin Wolfson, Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, vol. 1,

ed. Isadore Twersky and George H. Williams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 283.

12 - Ibid., p. 284. 13 - Edmund Husserl, The Paris Lectures, trans. Peter Koestenbaum, with an intro-

ductory essay (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1964), p. xxvii. 14 - Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phe-

nomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), ? 90, p. 217.

15 - For one excellent account of this history, I refer the reader to Sorabji's "From Aristotle to Brentano."

16 - Ibid., p. 247. 17 - Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, ed. Linda McAlister,

trans. A. Rancurello and D. Terrell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 88-89.

18- Ibid. 19 - Edmund Husserl, "Prolegomena," Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay

from the second German edition of Logische Untersuchungen (London: Rout- ledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), vol. 1, chap. 5, ?25, p. 114.

20 - Natalie Depraz, "When Transcendental Genesis Encounters the Naturalization Project," in Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenome- nology and Cognitive Science, ed. Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachou, and Jean-Michel Roy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 484.

21 - Ronald Mclntyre, "Dretske on Qualia," in Petitot et al., Naturalizing Phenome- nology, p. 433.

22 - Ibid.



Article Contentsp. 71p. 72p. 73p. 74p. 75p. 76p. 77p. 78p. 79p. 80p. 81p. 82

Issue Table of ContentsPhilosophy East and West, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 1-112Front MatterKans in the Dgen Tradition: How and Why Dgen Does What He Does with Kans[pp. 1-19]Dharmakrti and Priest on Change[pp. 20-28]'Place' and 'Being-Time': Spatiotemporal Concepts in the Thought of Nishida Kitar and Dgen Kigen[pp. 29-51]From Cannibalism to Empowerment: An Analects-Inspired Attempt to Balance Community and Liberty [pp. 52-70]Ibn Sn and Husserl on Intention and Intentionality[pp. 71-82]Feature ReviewThe Shifting Contours of the Confucian Tradition [pp. 83-94]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 95-99]Review: untitled [pp. 99-103]Review: untitled [pp. 103-106]Review: untitled [pp. 106-109]

Books Received [pp. 110-112]Back Matter

Documents

Husserl Ibn Sina