Mental Representation

by Gyula Klima (editor)

It is supposed to be common knowledge in the history of ideas that one of the few medieval philosophical contributions preserved in modern philosophical thought is the idea that mental phenomena are distinguished from physical phenomena by their intentionality, their directedness toward some object. As is usually the case with such commonplaces about the history of ideas, especially those concerning medieval ideas, this claim is not quite true. Medieval philosophers routinely described ordinary physical phenomena, such as reflections in mirrors or sounds in the air, as exhibiting intentionality, while they described what modern philosophers would take to be typically mental phenomena, such as sensation and imagination, as ordinary physical processes. Still, it is true that medieval philosophers would regard all acts of cognition as characterized by intentionality, on account of which all these acts are some sort of representations of their intended objects.

95 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2011

About the author

Gyula Klima is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, New York, Director of the Research Center for the History of Ideas of the Institute of Hungarian Research, Budapest, Hungary, and a Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is the Founding Director of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics and Editor of its Proceedings, as well as the Founding Director of the Society for the European History of Ideas and Editor of its Proceedings. He is also an editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the Editor-in-Chief of a book series at Springer, Historical-Analytical Studies in Mind, Nature and Action, and at Fordham, Medieval Philosophy, Texts and Studies. Before taking up his position at Fordham, he had taught philosophy in the US at Yale and Notre Dame, prior to which he had done research in Europe at the universities of Budapest, Helsinki, St. Andrews, and Copenhagen.