I ntentionality and concerns, and then trace it through his students’ attempts to clarify and develop his views, through Chisholm’s interpretation of Brentano, with its focus on thoughts about the non-existent, to the focus on the non-existent that has been so influential in contemporary theories of intentionality I’ll now turn to a further way in which Chisholm’s approach to intentionality impacted twentieth-century philosophy of mind As previously noted, twentieth-century analytic philosophers typically made a sharp theoretical distinction between the intentional properties of mental states, the properties they have in virtue of being about or of something, on the one hand, and the conscious or phenomenological properties of mental states, the properties they have in virtue of there being ‘something it is like’ to be in them, on the other hand Intentional properties and phenomenological properties were widely assumed to be metaphysically independent, and were accordingly studied in isolation from each other.38 In this section, I’ll argue that Chisholm’s focus on existential generalization and the principle of substitution led to a focus on ‘propositional attitudes’, which in turn partly motivated the mistakenly ‘separatist’ approach to intentionality and phenomenology in contemporary philosophy I’ll then summarize Brentano’s unified approach to these phenomena and his rejection of what motivated contemporary philosophers to treat consciousness and intentionality separately Although it may seem that Brentano’s view is hopelessly out of step with contemporary views, I’ll consider one contemporary view, representationalism, which looks to have strong affinities with Brentano’s views I’ll argue that these affinities are superficial, but that there is another contemporary approach, perhaps what we can call the ‘consciousness first approach’, that is far closer to the spirit of Brentano’s work 5.1 The separation of phenomenology and intentionality The explanation for the separatist approach to the phenomena of consciousness (phenomenology) and intentionality in recent philosophy is complicated and multifaceted, and I have the space only to gesture at two of its sources First, recent theories of intentionality have tended to focus on the propositional attitudes, e.g beliefs and desires, which have been almost universally assumed to lack any phenomenology.39 Indeed, intentionality was often straightforwardly characterized in terms of propositions Here are two typical examples of this approach First, according to Perry: The phenomenon of intentionality suggests that attitudes are essentially relational in nature: they involve relations to the propositions at which they are directed. . . An attitude seems to be individuated by the agent, the type of attitude (belief, desire, etc.), and the proposition at which it is directed.40 217