FREUD TO DERRIDA all alike demanded the emancipation of logic from psychology; all alike found in the notion of meaning their escape-route from subjectivist theories of thinking; nearly all of them championed a Platonic theory of meanings, i.e of concepts and propositions; all alike demarcated philosophy from natural science by allocating factual enquiries to the natural sciences and conceptual enquiries to philosophy; nearly all of them talked as if these conceptual enquiries of philosophy terminated in some super-inspections of some super-objects, as if conceptual enquiries were, after all, super-observational enquiries; all of them, however, in the actual practice of their conceptual enquiries necessarily diverged from the super-observations that their Platonising epistemology required Husserl talked of intuiting essences somewhat as Moore talked of inspecting concepts, and as Russell talked of acquaintanceship with universals, but of course it was by their intellectual wrestlings, not by any intellectual intuitings, that they tackled their actual conceptual difficulties (CP i 180) Ryle does well to emphasize the common starting point of the analytic and Continental traditions; but in the case of Husserl, the intellectual wrestlings were, in fact, more complicated than this brisk passage suggests Husserl took over from Brentano the notion of intentionality, that is to say, the idea that what is characteristic of mental, as opposed to physical, phenomena is that they are directed to objects I think of Troy, perhaps, or I worry about my investments—intentionality is the feature indicated in the little words ‘of ’ and ‘about’ What is the relation between what is going on in my mind and a long defunct city or stock markets across the world? Husserl, and many after him, spent years wondering about the answer to that question.1 Two things are essential to a thought: that it should have a content and that it should have a possessor Suppose that I think of a dragon Two things make this the thought it is: first, that it is the thought of a dragon and not of an eagle or a horse; second, that it is my thought and not your thought or Napoleon’s thought Husserl would mark these features by saying that it was an act of mine with a particular matter (its intentional object) Other people, too, may think of dragons; in that case, for Husserl, we have several individual acts belonging to the same species The concept Intentionality is nothing to with ‘intention’ in the modern sense Brentano took the word from medieval contexts, in which it was derived from the verb ‘intendere’, meaning to pull a bowstring in the course of aiming at a target An intentional object is, as it were, the target of a thought 80