Watsuji, Intentionality, and Psychopathology

Intentionality, Politics, And Religion

The idea that intentionality is the distinctive mark of the mental or that only mental phenomena have intentionality emerged in the philosophical tradition after Franz Brentano. Much of contemporary philosophy is dedicated to a rejection of the view that mental phenomena have original intentionality. In other words, main strands of contemporary philosophy seek to naturalize intentionality of th...

Watsuji and Deleuze and Guattari in the Climate of Culture

Seth Jacobowitz, in his paper "Watsuji and Deleuze and Guattari in the Climate of Culture," analyzes theories of cultural properties in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus alongside Watsuji Tetsuro's prewar Climate and Culture. At stake in these investigations is the status of the West as a universalizing particular ratified by these authors in the instance of its own critiq...

Consciousness, Intentionality, and Causality

To explain how stimuli cause consciousness, we have to explain causality. We can’t trace linear causal chains from receptors after the first cortical synapse, so we use circular causality to explain neural pattern formation by self-organizing dynamics. But an aspect of intentional action is causality, which we extrapolate to material objects in the world. Thus causality is a property of mind, n...

Intentionality and choice

People judge that harmful side effects are intentional, e.g., a CEO who introduces a new program to increase profits that results in harm to the environment is judged to have intentionally harmed the environment. They judge helpful side effects are unintentional, e.g., a CEO who introduces a new program to increase profits that results in helping the environment is not judged to have intentiona...

Intentionality and partial belief