Consciousness and representation

In this chapter, the author raises new objections to the self-representational reading of Brentano. This reading, he argues, is untenable simply because Brentano regards a representational perception as conceptually impossible. He then provides a new construal of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, based on a phenomenological approach to intentionality and consciousness. In his view, the main purpose of Brentano’s theory of intentionality is to account for mental acts that are not (inner) perceptions, that is, for acts in which something appears without existing.