ABSTRACT
As you read these words you are conscious of something. Maybe you are conscious of the words, or maybe you are mainly conscious of the meaning of the words as your eyes skim over the lines of the text. If you look up you will find yourself in some kind of environment. Perhaps you are sitting with this book at your desk; or maybe you are reading this book as you soak in the tub sipping a glass of champagne. Indeed, you may be studying your philosophy in extraordinary style. In any case, if you look up you will see something. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter what. We know that whether you are reading the text or looking around the room or tasting your champagne or hearing a noise in the next room, you are conscious of something, because that is the way consciousness works. If you were conscious of nothing, as Sartre once put it, you would be unconscious. In the phenomenological tradition, this idea, that consciousness is always consciousness-of-something, is referred to as the intentionality of consciousness. In this chapter we want to make clear why this is an important concept for understanding cognition.
