Husserl: Intentionality

Husserl’s treatment of intentionality does not just account for how the mind picks out objects in the world. Rather, it accounts for how the object comes to be given for the subject, with the kind of orderliness and permanence, vis-à-vis the changeable materials of consciousness, as to invest it with objectivity and materiality in the first place. The account is developed from the first-person perspective, and it involves a methodical “bracketing” of the world and the objects in it, so as to investigate their constitution in intentional acts. Husserl’s discussions of intentionality contain a variety of more or less arcane technical terms: “constitution,” “the horizons,” “the noesis,” and “the noema,” giving rise to various issues. A discussion in the secondary literature may thus appear to focus on the topic of “constitution,” another, say, on “the horizons,” or on “the noema.” It may be no easy matter to decide whether these are mere terminological differences, or whether we are indeed dealing with important differences in perspective or subject matter.