ABSTRACT
The structure of intentionality is essential, in the precise sense that that term expresses the invariant directedness to an object other than that directedness and the object itself of that directedness. Contemporary philosophical discourse about intentionality in both analytic and continental traditions, in addition to its systematic preoccupations, recognize intentionality as a fundamental philosophical concern in Ancient and Mediaeval philosophy, but not in the modern period. The core of Edmund Husserl’s descriptive psychological account of intentionality focuses on a crucial phenomenological distinction internal to the structure of lived-experience, which characterizes its intrinsic and non-intrinsic aspects. Husserl’s transcendental account of intentionality no longer characterizes it in terms of essential structure of a class of lived-experiences but rather as the essential structure of transcendentally phenomenologically reduced region of pure consciousness. Husserl’s transcendental account of intentionality introduces the Greek terms “noesis” and “noema” to characterize, respectively, whole of the actual and non-actual intentional directedness and thematic and horizonal aspects of the intentional object.
