Intentional Objects Research Articles

Triple Disjunctivism, Naive Realism, and Anti-representationalism

Abstract Contemporary defenders of non-disjunctivism take a representationalist philosophy of mind for granted; all kinds of conscious intentional states/acts/events are automatically regarded as being representations. The paper presents an alternative anti-representationalist view of the mind. It differs from other present-day anti-representationalisms in arguing that all conscious phenomena contains a this-worldly something called “from-pole”, and it denies that an intentional content and the corresponding intentional object always are distinct entities. The view is set in contrast to both a transcendental ego tradition and a no from-pole tradition. Hereby, the paper defends the common sense-like view that we are persons who directly perceive, act in, and talk about things in a common world.

Places of Elision

Places of Elision Kristina Mendicino (bio) Die abgewrackten Tabus, und die Grenzgängerei zwischen ihnen, weltennaß, auf Bedeutungsjagd, auf Bedeutungsflucht. There: Where? “There” cannot be pointed out, nor can it be predicated upon. It is not a place, nor is it an “it.” One cannot arrive “there,” because one is already “there,” just as every word that is spoken or written, including these here, is there. And yet, what is “there” is always elsewhere… an alibi. “There” (Da) is cast, precisely, as “Entfernung”—where distance (Ferne) and distance from distance (Ent-) hang together in a dynamic suspension—towards the beginning of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of the “Da” in Sein und Zeit (1927), between the paragraphs addressing the directions (Verweisungen) that constitute worldliness and the tuning (Stimmung) in which one is ever finding oneself.1 This suspension is not, therefore, indifferent, but emerges with the structure of pragmatic directions from which spatiality is first to be understood. Because the “there” is, first of all, the “Verweisungszusammenhang” (87) of the world in which understanding, meaningfulness, and possibility are co-founded and lived out, all that there is cannot but be oriented. Being-there is, in this context, being-towards; topology, teleology; every “Da” and “Wo,” a “Dazu” and “Wozu” (78): “Der Platz und die Platzmannigfaltigkeit dürfen nicht als das Wo eines beliebigen [End Page 585] Vorhandenseins der Dinge ausgelegt werden. Der Platz ist je das bestimmte »Dort« und »Da« des Hingehörens eines Zeugs” (102). For this reason, Heidegger points out, a topos or “Platz” cannot be fixed as a particular position in space, conceived as a mathematical, homogeneous continuum of points. The accent in “Hingehören” must be placed on the “hin,” insofar as being-there is to be at work from and towards mutable, but impassible distances: “[s]eine Ent-fernung hat das Dasein so wenig durchkreuzt, daß es sie vielmehr mitgenommen hat und ständig mitnimmt, weil es wesenhaft Ent-fernung, das heißt räumlich ist” (108). Wherever something is, either in the greatest distance from view, like the glasses on my nose, or in the nearing “Reich-, Greif, und Blickweite” of the next tool to grasp (107), it is always here… and elsewhere. The meaning of “there,” in every sense, thus stems from an existential, teleological syntax. Much is staked upon this syntax of what is there, for this is the condition of the possibility “dafür, daß das verstehende Dasein als auslegendes so etwas wie »Bedeutungen« erschließen kann, die ihrerseits wieder das mögliche Sein von Wort und Sprache fundieren” (87). Edmund Husserl, to whom Heidegger dedicates his book, also distinguishes “Bedeutungen” as prior to and independent of any individual word that might give them expression.2 These “Bedeutungen,” though structured by intentional acts, [End Page 586] depend for their truth and fulfillment upon the “Anschauung” of the intentional objects of these acts.3 But Heidegger seeks the existential foundations of meaning and sense in praxis,4 where theory and praxis, meaning and fulfillment, object and subject are not yet distinguished for themselves as the derivative, “undaseinsmäßig[en]” categories that they are (44). Before the timeless realm of ideal, selfsame, unified meanings that Husserl traces in his logic, meaning and, secondarily, words, emerge from the “there.” For this same reason, “there” cannot be, properly speaking, a noun or even a deictic adverb—these, as Heidegger writes in his discussion of “hier” and “dort,” “sind nur möglich in einem »Da«, das heißt wenn ein Seiendes ist, das als Sein des »Da« Räumlichkeit erschlossen hat” (132)—nor can it be primarily spatial, if “Räumlichkeit” must first be “erschlossen” by and from the “Sein des Da.”5 The word “there” can be none other than an alibi for a structure that is articulated differently. And indeed, the sense of “there” will differ, as Heidegger’s analysis of being-there among everyday tools—where no “Um-Zu” marks an authentic end, but the endless circulation of worldly production—turns around with the exposure of the temporal horizon from which the “Da,”6 as well as every direction, is to be truly understood. [End Page 587] This peripeteia pivots upon Sein...

The Sufferings of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Trans. and ed. by Stanley Corngold (review)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther. Trans, and ed. Stanley Corngold. Norton Critical Editions. New York: WW Norton, 2012.238 pp.Stanley Corngold's volume for Norton Critical Editions joins Walter Arndt's translation of Faust (edited by Cyrus Hamlin) as the second work by Goethe in this important series. Corngold also translated and edited Kafka's Selected Stories for the series.To accompany his new translation, Corngold has written an insightful introduction, the flavor of which is manifest in this example: Note the key terms in this 'argument,' for they are original Goethe: the seat of consciousness is, for want of a more precise physiological or philosophical term, the 'heart.'The relation of the self to its intentional object is not that of a concept to a thing but a 'heart' to a 'presence': the world is 'present-to' a type of consciousness other than a conceptual consciousness-one closer to inner sensation than brain or mind (xii). Rich perceptive analysis, the introduction as a whole is worth reading even for those well acquainted Goethe. As background and contexts, the book presents relevant excerpts from the correspondence between Goethe and Kestner, lampoons by Nicolai and Thackeray, and helpful sections from Goethe's autobiography.To represent the voluminous criticism of the novel, Corngold has chosen interesting essays by Harry Steinhauer, Roland Barthes, R. Ellis Dye, David E. Wellbery, Hans Rudolf Vaget, Dirk von Petersdorff, and Christiane Frey and David Martyn.The Barthes text especially gives readers otherwise unaware of the novel's influence a good sense of its importance beyond the German eighteenth century. A chronology and a selected bibliography of English-language criticism of the novel, including ten entries from the Goethe Yearbook, bring the book to a close.Goethe's first novel has attracted a host of translators, including translations into English by Catherine Hutter (Signet, 1962), Harry Steinhauer (Norton, 1970-like Corngold he translates the title as The Sufferings of Young Werther), Michael Hulse (Penguin, 1989), Victor Lange (Princeton University Press, 1994), and David Constantine, whose translation for Oxford World's Classics appeared almost simultaneously Corngold's.The perils of translation are historically demonstrated by R. D. Boylan's early English version (Bohn's Standard Library, 1854), in which he notoriously has Lotte begging Werther with broken sobs, to leave her not noticing that Werther complies the request-bat ihn schluchzend fortzufahren-by taking up the manuscript to read on. I was saved from a similarly egregious error in my translation of Peter Handke's A Voyage to the Rivers (Viking, 1997) when my friend and Handke translator into Serbian Zarko Radakovic pointed out that the new Gavrilo Princip Handke was calling for was not a Serbian principle (of law? of business?) but an assassin. In his review of the first edition of Corngold's translation (New York Review of Books, April 26, 2012), J. …

A estrutura do noema e a dupla concepção do objeto intencional em Husserl

O presente artigo aborda a especificidade do vivido intencional e a sua relação com as sensações não intencionais. Em seguida, examina a relação entre a noese e o noema, além de analisar a estrutura completa do noema. Mostra que o objeto intencional oscila entre o caráter imanente do noema e o que transcende o próprio noema. Ele traz como conclusão, então, que a análise da estrutura completa do noema evidencia uma dupla concepção do objeto intencional na subjetividade transcendental.

The Hypothesis That Anorexia Nervosa Is a Passion: Clarifications and Elaborations

The Hypothesis That Anorexia Nervosa Is a Passion:Clarifications and Elaborations Louis C. Charland (bio), Tony Hope (bio), Anne Stewart (bio), and Jacinta Tan (bio) Keywords Anorexia nervosa, passion, emotion, feeling, mood, authenticity, identity We are grateful for these two insightful commentaries, which both see novelty and value in the manner in which we invoke the hypothesis that anorexia nervosa is a passion, to help explain data from the Anorexia Experiences Study, which provides the basis of our inquiry. In this response, we wish to clarify and elaborate on our hypothesis; in particular, the difference between passions and moods, the manner in which our hypothesis touches on issues of authenticity and identity, and the compelling parallel with addiction. We also wish to emphasize that, in proposing the hypothesis that anorexia nervosa is a passion, our primary aim is not so much to exclude or replace alternative theoretical approaches. Our focus, really, is to argue that the hypothesis that anorexia nervosa is a passion adds something rich and unique to our current understanding of that condition, which is not fully or adequately captured by alternative accounts. Passions and Moods Hannah Bowden asks whether the descriptive theoretical virtues we attribute to ‘passion’ might also be accomplished by referring to “Heideggerian mood,” or “a form of Heideggerian mood in combination with certain beliefs” (Bowden 2013, 368). She explicitly asks how passions differ from moods. These are important questions. To begin, note that in her remarks Bowden is inquiring about the descriptive capabilities of the theoretical constructs ‘passion’ and ‘mood.’ Her concern is largely with phenomenological description. Now it is indeed true that we argue that ‘passion’ plays a pivotal role in the description of the clinical course and nature of anorexia nervosa, although admittedly we do not engage in phenomenology per se. However, what must be emphasized is that we also wish to argue that, properly understood, the construct ‘passion’ plays a theoretically irreducible and ineliminable role in the explanation of the clinical course of anorexia nervosa; in particular, the manner in which many of the feelings and emotions in anorexia nervosa [End Page 375] succeed one another in apparently rule-governed and even law-like ways. Our contention is that neither the concepts ‘emotion,’ ‘feeling,’ ‘mood,’ ‘belief,’ or any combination of these, can adequately describe or explain the complex progressive syndrome that is anorexia nervosa. Something like the concept of passion we invoke from Ribot is required. Although much work remains to be done, this at least is the essence of our case. We believe that it is an especially important theoretical virtue of the concept of passion that we employ that it helps to describe and explain, both how and why the anorexic syndrome can sometimes take the tragic, progressive, worsening, course it does. Indeed, at one point Ribot likens passions where there is a loss of control of this sort to an ‘avalanche.’ This compelling metaphor suggests a tightly bound, progressive, worsening, affective–intellectual–motivational syndrome that, in our view, cannot credibly be labeled or identified, described or explained, with moods, or simply moods plus certain beliefs. Furthermore, ‘passion’ in our view cannot be accounted for using other preexisting theoretical concepts, or any combination of these. Our claim is that the concept ‘passion’—and not simply the term—must be added (reinstated, to be precise) to our current existing theoretical framework. None of this is to say that moods might not play an important part in the phenomenological and clinical description of the anorexic syndrome, or its explanation. But that is an independent empirical question that we did not attempt to answer in our article. To further clarify, there are in fact quite a few important differences between moods and passions on our account. First, passions may initially be voluntarily chosen, whereas moods, normally, are not. Second, passions are tied to an ‘intentional object’ or fixed idea, whereas moods, normally, are not. Third, passions require the intellectual resources of reason and cognition, whereas moods, normally, do not. Fourth, passions are often tied to specific stereotypical action tendencies, whereas moods, normally, are not. Fifth, passions are stable and may endure for years, whereas moods tend to be more fleeting and temporary...

The Emotional and Narrative Significance of Rose of Sharon’s Mysterious Smile

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath concludes in a grotesque yet powerful scene in which Rose of Sharon, having just lost her own child, breastfeeds a dying stranger in a rain-soaked barn surrounded by flooded cotton fields. This scene has garnered a great deal of criticism and analysis, both negative and positive. Classic studies by Clifton Fadiman and Leslie Fielder have criticized it as a purely symbolic scene that does little to resolve the otherwise realistic novel.1 Concerned with how the final scene’s imagery and apparent symbolism detract from its realism, Scott Pugh has noted that Rose’s action is “palpably inadequate to deal with the hunger of others” (78). Exploring the work’s biblical connections with Genesis and Exodus and with The Pilgrim’s Progress, other critics have interpreted the ending more positively.2 But these approaches examine the broad iconic quality of the scene without regard to the significance of the novel’s concluding detail: Rose of Sharon’s “lips came together and smiled mysteriously” (Grapes 455). In disregarding this detail to focus on the act’s allusive imagery, these critics focus on what the act means to the reader, while neglecting to examine what the act may mean to the one who performs it, Rose of Sharon. Her mysterious smile is no incidental detail. Its significance is indicated not only by its emphatic position within the narrative, but also by being the culmination of a sequence of smiles. Examining this sequence and the reasons why Rose of Sharon smiles, this paper will revisit the final scene on a personal level, attending to a single character in order to show that this physical act of smiling has a significance of its own outside the realm of imagery or symbolism. In Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Martha Nussbaum asserts that emotions “are about something: they have an object . . . the object is an intentional object. . . . These emotions embody not simply ways of seeing an object, but beliefs—often very complex—about the object” (27–28). In other words, we experience emotions in reaction to events and occasions in our

Sainsbury on Thinking about Fictional Things

In a number of places Mark Sainsbury has recently developed an attractive irrealist account of fiction and intentionality, on which there are no fictional objects or exotic intentional entities. A central component of his account is an ambitious argument, which aims to establish that the truth of intensional transitives such as “I think about Holmes” and “Alexander feared Zeus” does not require the existence of fictional or intentional objects. It would be good news indeed for the irrealist if Sainsbury’s argument worked. However, I argue that Sainsbury’s argument fails. I conclude by considering how Sainsbury’s irrealist might explain our intuitions about such sentences, drawing upon another component of Sainsbury’s irrealism.

Narratives of (Mad) Desire

Satisfied desires make you happy. Desires are fantasy narratives a person tells about her life and goals. They focus on intentional objects that are happiness-makers for the person: to achieve them is supposed to make one happy. Normally, such objects are good things and their context is seen in a positive manner. However, the goals may also be hurtful, as the person herself sees it. These are, at least sometimes, mad desires. To explain them, it is not enough to say that they are impulsive and irrational, unconscious, or that they are good in disguise. I explain what this means and give some examples. I also consider the thesis that satisfaction of desire is less than full happiness, which may well be true. This becomes clear when we think of moral choices.

Humility and Generosity: On the Horizontality of Divine Givenness

Summary Husserl’s notion of horizon plays a decisive role in his phenomenological analysis of perception. It is nevertheless striking that prominent philosophers of the “theological turn” in phenomenology, such as Levinas and Marion, attach no religious significance to the phenomenological horizon; on the contrary, they tend to regard the horizon as an obstacle to the experience of the religious. This article argues, however, that if divinity is somehow implied in the proximity of things (the things’ inner horizons) and yet stretches out to the most remote (the outer horizon), horizontality neatly captures the divine givenness. Far from imposing restrictions on experience, the horizon opens the possibility for meaningful experience in the first place; and far from being closed in on itself, the horizon remains inherently open to revision and change. Moreover, the horizon unfolds according to a double movement of what can be called its humility and its generosity: it withdraws from the actual presence of intentional objects (humility) in order for such objects to emerge (generosity). Arguably, revelation does not cancel the non-objective givenness of the horizon, but reveals the divine horizontality by enacting its double movement: Christ is driven out of the world (humility) in order to save it (generosity).

From social-signal detection to higher social cognition: an fMRI approach

Implicit or automatic detection of social signals, which discriminate animate, intentional objects in the environment, is essential for higher social cognition and its development. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we identified the neural substrate of detecting simple visual social signals and examined its functional link with the mechanism of inferring another's mental state. Healthy participants were presented with the eye-gaze shift (EG) and self-propelling motion (SP) under both implicit and explicit task conditions. They also performed a social role-playing game in which mental inference (MI) was implicitly prompted during the presentation of faces (implicit MI). Implicit detection of EG and SP activated the posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) bilaterally, whereas the right posterior superior temporal sulcus was activated during the explicit conditions. We revealed that the individual variation in neural response in the right pMTG during implicit eye-gaze detection explains the individual tendency to recruit the regions implicated in mental-state inference (medial prefrontal cortex, temporal pole and striatum) during the implicit MI task. Our results suggest that the implicit detection of visual social signals involves the pMTG and underlies the development of higher social cognition.

Intentional Objects, Pretence, and the Quasi-Relational Nature of Mental Phenomena: A New Look at Brentano on Intentionality

Brentano famously changed his mind about intentionality between the 1874 and 1911 editions of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (PES). The 1911 edition repudiates the 1874 view that to think about something is to stand in a relation to something that is within in the mind, and holds instead that intentionality is only like a relation (it is ‘quasi-relational’). Despite this, Brentano still insists that mental activity involves ‘the reference to something as an object’, much as he did in the 1874 edition of PES. The question is what Brentano might have meant by this, given that he rejects a relational account of intentionality. The present paper suggests an answer. It draws on recent work on pretence theory to provide a model of Brentano’s notion of the quasi-relational nature of mental phenomena, as well as of the notion of mental reference to an object, and argues that the model helps to explain why Brentano might have been able discern a clear continuity between the views of the 1874 and 1911 editions of PES, despite the differences.

There are Intentionalia of Which it is True that Such Objects Do Not Exist

According to Crane’s schematicity thesis (ST) about intentional objects, intentionalia have no particular metaphysical nature qua thought-of entities; moreover, the real metaphysical nature of intentionalia is various, insofar as it is settled independently of the fact that intentionalia are targets of one’s thought. As I will point out, ST has the ontological consequence that the intentionalia that really belong to the general inventory of what there is, the overall domain, are those that fall under a good metaphysical kind, i.e., a kind such that its members figure (for independent reasons) in such an inventory. Negatively put, if there are no things of a certain metaphysical kind, thoughts about things of that kind are not really committed to such things. Pace Crane, however, this does not mean that the intentionalia that are really there are only those that exist. For existence, qua first-order property, is no metaphysical kind. Thus, there may really be intentionalia that do not exist, provided that they belong to good metaphysical kinds.

Constitutional Craftsmanship and the Rule of Law: Organizational Arrangement, Moral Imagination, and the Separation of Powers

Is of anything more than a fictional allusion? After all, is an abstract noun, and abstract nouns can't rule. Only people can rule. Rule of law is a fiction, one that has been around since ancient times. Whether, or under what circumstances, rule of law might be an ideal type rather than just a convenient fiction is the topic of this paper. For rule of law to be an ideal type that plausibly describes actual practice, it is necessary for governance to follow polycentric principles. This paper explores whether there are constitutional arrangements under which it could reasonably be claimed that governance reflects a deep level operation of a rule of law despite the surface level recognition rulership can be exercised only by people.

A stag hunt with signalling and mutual beliefs

The problem of cooperation for rational actors comprises two sub problems: the problem of the intentional object (under what description does each actor perceive the situation?) and the problem of common knowledge for finite minds (how much belief iteration is required?). I will argue that subdoxastic signalling can solve the problem of the intentional object as long as this is confined to a simple coordination problem. In a more complex environment like an assurance game signals may become unreliable. Mutual beliefs can then bolster the earlier attained equilibrium. I will first address these two problems by means of an example, in order to draw some more general lessons about combining evolutionary theory and rationality later on.

Actual and non-actual motion: why experientialist semantics needs phenomenology (and vice versa)

Experientialist semantics has contributed to a broader notion of linguistic meaning by emphasizing notions such as construal, perspective, metaphor, and embodiment, but has suffered from an individualist concept of meaning and has conflated experiential motivations with conventional semantics. We argue that these problems can be redressed by methods and concepts from phenomenology, on the basis of a case study of sentences of non-actual motion such as “The mountain range goes all the way from Mexico to Canada.” Through a phenomenological reanalysis of proposals of Talmy, Langacker, and Matlock, we show that non-actual motion is both experientially and linguistically non-unitary. At least three different features of human consciousness—enactive perception, visual scanning, and imagination—constitute experiential motivations for non-actual motion sentences, and each of these could be related to phenomenological analyses of human intentionality. The second problem is addressed by proposing that the experiential motivations of non-actual motion sentences can be viewed as sedimented through “passive” processes of acquisition and social transmission and that this implies an interactive loop between experience and language, yielding losses in terms of original experience, but gains in terms of communal signification. Something that is underestimated by phenomenology is that what is sedimented are not only intentional objects such as states of affairs, but aspects of how they are given, i.e., the original, temporal, bodily experiences themselves. Since cognitive semantics has emphasized such aspects of meaning, we suggest that phenomenology can itself benefit from experientialist semantics, especially when it turns its focus from prepredicative to predicative, linguistic intentionality.

Must Europe Be Swiss? On the Idea of a Voting Space and the Possibility of a Multilingual Demos

Contrary to the view that linguistic homogeneity is required to create a viable demos, this article argues that linguistic diversity can be a permanent feature of any democratic community, so long as there is aunified and robust voting spacethat provides a common intentional object, around which distinct public spheres can aesthetically organize their political discourse. An attempt to explain how such a voting space operates in Switzerland, the finest existing exemplar of a multilingual demos, is given. Following the Swiss example, the author proposes, would go a long way to constituting the European Union as a democratically legitimate trans-national demos, despite its formidable linguistic diversity.

Intentional Foreign Object Ingestions: Determining Factors Associated with Hospital Admission, Therapeutic Endoscopy, and Surgery

Intentional Foreign Object Ingestions: Determining Factors Associated with Hospital Admission, Therapeutic Endoscopy, and Surgery

Varieties of intentional objects

This paper proposes a classification of entities that are introduced in various theories of intentionality under the label “intentional objects.” Franz Brentano's immanent objects, Alexius Meinong's entities “beyond being and non-being” and Roman Ingarden's purely intentional objects can serve as examples of such entities. They all have in common that they have been introduced in order to extensionalize so-called “intentional contexts.” Not all such objects, however, deserve the name of intentional objects. In particular, neither Frege's senses nor mental contents of the early Husserl are to be classified as intentional objects in my sense. Roughly speaking, to be called “an intentional object,” a postulated entity must be supposed to function as a target of the subject's intention: intentional objects are supposed to stand “before the subject's mind” so that they “replace” the common sense objects of reference. The intentional objects that were introduced in the history of philosophy make up groups that, ontologically, are very heterogeneous. It is, however, possible to formulate certain systematic criteria for classifying them.

Scheler’s Foundation of Ethics

In this paper I would like to deal with Scheler’s emotional ethics and its relationship with a possible ontological foundation. I want to address the theme of values and acts, asking whether they are rooted in being or whether they possess their status autonomously, and where they obtain their legality and consistency from. I will face first of all Scheler’s original discovery of the special status of value as intentional object and the correlated human capacity of grasping it, realizing the corrected order of values and fulfilling the “moral good”. In the end, as I will underline how Scheler’s gain lies in the avoidance of reducing the foundation of ethics to a transcendental deduction or to an inductive-empirical method, I will stress the problem of his personalistic ethic, in the attempt to hand over to the person the whole discretion of letting values emerge and affirm in the history.

What is Phenomenological Music, and What Does It Have to Do with Salvatore Sciarrino?

WHAT IS PHENOMENOLOGICAL MUSIC, AND WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH SALVATORE SCIARRINO? AARON HELGESON HERE EXISTS, IN THE CIRCLE of contemporary musicians in which we find ourselves, a growing discussion of a music which is purported to be phenomenological. This label seems to be applied consistently to several composers making use of non-traditional instrumental sounds (Helmut Lachenmann, Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin, and Rebecca Saunders, to name only a few), but it has made its most conspicuous appearances in relation to the music of Salvatore Sciarrino. For example , program notes for the Kontinent Sciarrino series at the 2008 Salzburg Festival describe his music as: concentrated expressions of life, which while listening allow the border to dissolve between inner or outer reality. This art of T What is Phenomenological Music? 5 refined perception has been variously related to Sciarrino’s Sicilian origins: the silence of the heat of midday, the deserted landscape and the shimmering Mediterranean light as a background, against which this kind of musical phenomenology can unfold.1 As has often been the case in situations where such labels are used to categorize emerging musical practice, the word has been applied not primarily by its practitioners, but by its observers. In such instances, these labels have frequently been reclaimed, revised, and re(de)fined by those whose work has been so categorized. Most recently, we have observed the coining of the label spectralist by musicologists, and the term’s subsequent reclamation by composers like Tristan Murail, Jonathan Harvey, and Joshua Fineberg. Similar examples in the twentieth century can be found with labels such as minimalist, serialist, new complexity, and experimental. There is, however, an important way in which the label “phenomenological ” stands out from these examples, for it invokes a particular intellectual discourse that predates its current usage by at least a century. That discourse is the phenomenological philosophy of Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This philosophical tradition—known for its emphasis on empirical observation and radically descriptive (as opposed to explanatory) investigation—brings with it a very long and complicated history in describing perceptual experience. Surprisingly, though, the works of these philosophers include barely any mention of sound, let alone music.2 Insofar as the philosophical practice of phenomenology has been invoked in describing contemporary music (including both its works and its workers), it is relevant to explore the meaning of words like phenomenon and phenomenological in such a context, and whether indeed their applicability is unique to the music they are used to describe. To begin, we must investigate what the phenomenological project is,3 in order to ascertain what it might be able to tell us about sound in general, and music in particular. Phenomenology is the study of phenomena. In the most literal sense, this means that phenomenological investigation aims to describe not things as they are (noumenon), but things as they appear to us (phainomenon). To a phenomenologist, perception is always perception of and about something: phenomenology contends that once underway all experience, whether fulfilled or remaining “empty,” is found to have a specific 6 Perspectives of New Music shape in that all experience is “referential,” “directional,” and “attentional.” All experience is experience of ———. Anything can fill in the blank. The name for this shape of experience is intentionality .4 Its of-and-about-ness means that there is an object to our perception (a marble, a song, a color, another person, a sunset) as well as an intentional act (seeing, thinking, walking, hearing). We therefore call these perceptual phenomena intentional objects: objects that exist in nothing more, or less, than our experience of them. Intentional objects distinguish themselves from physical objects in at least two important ways: 1) they need not conform to an objective explanation of reality,5 and 2) they are experienced all-at-once (Zugleich) as a totality, rather than as a summation of partial views or individual dimensions.6 For a simple example of the former, we need only consider the color black, which appears as a color, but which “in reality” contains no visible frequencies of light. For an example of the latter, imagine that I hear the sound of a...