ABSTRACT
Nowadays, all philosophy students are supposed to know that the notion of intentionality represents a fundamental, distinctive feature of mental, as opposed to physical phenomena, namely, their intrinsic directedness to an object. Since intentionality pertains to the objects of cognitive acts on account of being targeted by those cognitive acts, the students should start answering these questions by taking a quick look at these acts themselves. The one-sentence sketch of the “grand vision” of Aristotelian hylomorphism should at least provide some motivation to suspect why medieval Aristotelians, in particular Aquinas and Hervaeus, thinking in this framework, did not have to bother much about the distinction between “the mental” and “the physical,” and did not have to think of intentionality as “the mark of the mental,” opposing it to “the physical.” Accordingly, on this “modern” conception, it is perfectly possible for a cognitive subject to have exactly the same mental acts regardless of what happens to their external objects.
