Intentionality: A Study of Mental Acts (review)

132 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY largely a reluctant bystander during World War !I, fearful both of Nazism and of fanning the fires of domestic chauvinism. Considering the enormity of this climactic impasse in Dewey's approach to the Second World War, it is given relatively short shrift. The most influential American philosopher found himself trapped in a double bind in which the historical consequences of either wholesale militarism or pacifism would crate conditions hostile to the aims of a liberal education for nonviolent social reconstruction. Regardless of our conclusions on the particulars of Dewey's pragmatic pacifism, the great merit of Howlett's book consists in the discussion it inspires in contemporary terms, for Dewey's struggle symbolically crystallizes that of all who ponder the fate of nonviolence in a world of seemingly growing irrationality which knows no national boundaries. JONATHAND. MORENO George Washington University Richard E. Aquila. lntentionality: A Study of Mental Acts. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977. Pp. xi + 168. $13.50. Professor Aquila is concerned with the general nature of such cognitive facts as that a see (thinks of, imagines, etc.) O, or thinks (understands, imagines, believes, etc.) that 0 is red. Taking anything cognized to be an "object of a mental state," he supposes that: "To discuss the 'objects' of mental states is . . . ambiguous.... For I may--speaking 'de re' of some actually existing object---report that it is the object of some particular mental state; or I may--speaking 'de dicto' of some particular mental state---merely report that it is, or involves, an awareness or conception of some object" (p. ix). Aquila (quite wrongly, in my view) believes that there are two senses of "object" and "awareness" involved here; and he reserves the word "intentionality" for awareness in the de dicto case, where the "object" cognized may be nonexistent. Mental states exhibiting "intentionality" are then called "mental acts," of which the book is a study. The work progresses through an examination, in sequence, of questions concerning the ontological status of "objects" of cognizance, whether and how cognizance essentially involves relations to its objects, and the nature of mental contents insofar as they are neither objects nor relations to objects. However, the discussion is not simply a systematic one, determined by conceptual developments only. Rather it is primarily carried on through an examination of certain passages in, respectively, Hurne (pp. 2-6), Descartes (pp. 6-13), Brentano (pp. 13-24), Chisholm and Brentano (pp. 27-47), Meinong (pp. 62-73), Bergmann (pp. 73-78), Russell (pp. 78-85), Meinong and Findlay (pp. 95-102), Frege and Husserl (pp. 107-121), and Wilfrid Sellars (pp. 122-46). Closer examination reveals, it seems, a certain vacillation in Aquila's approach to his task. He states: "My purpose is to provide a critical and analytical survey of the major attempts, in modern philosophy, to interpret the phenomenon of intentionality" (p. ix; see pp. 87, 107). Yet he also claims that "it is . . . the aim of this book to arrive at a more positive characterization of the phenomenon of awareness and hence of the notion of an 'object' of awareness" (p. 26). Now these are by no means inconsistent goals and should, indeed, be mutually supportive. However it also is possible to be distracted by the dialectical elaboration of conceptual possibilities when the need is for thorough historical work, and by references to historical figures when the need is for thorough statement of a categorial framework of analysis. The result may be, as seems to me to be the case with Aquila, that somethihg useful is done, but that neither the goal of historical insight nor that of "positive characterization" is greatly advanced. The need for more thorough historical inquiry---not necessarily of great length and complexity --is shown, for example, when Aquila is led to "distinguish between the 'ultimate' object of an BOOK REVIEWS 133 act, toward which one's attention is directed in that act, and some other object of attention" (p. 99). This distinction (by no means an insignificant one for Aquila's viewpoint) is what, at bottom, was dealt with in the rich discussions of apperception in the eighteenth through the early twentieth...