INTENTIONALITY. – A philosophical term derived from *intention*, and today predominantly used to designate the order of knowability in its broadest sense as a tendency (*in-tendere*) and contact between subject and object.
By *intention* is first understood the act of willing, that is, the actual tendency of the will toward its formal object, which is the good (*V. INTENTION*). However, it is common in philosophy to use the term to signify both the act of knowing (i.e., the actual cognitive tendency of the subject toward the object) and, above all, the object known, which constitutes the formal term of the actual act of knowing. This terminology is characteristic of realistic philosophy and is already found, with various nuances, in St. Augustine, the Arab philosophers, the medieval scholastics, and in particular in St. Thomas Aquinas, who frequently refers to the object of direct or metaphysical knowledge as *prima intentio* and to the object of reflexive or logical knowledge as *secunda intentio*. Even contemporary Thomistic philosophy employs the noun *intention* to denote both the act and the object of knowing, and the adjective *intentional* to indicate everything that in any way pertains to the cognitive order, and in particular to the intellectual order. It is in this sense that the abstract term *intentionality* primarily signifies knowability and intellectuality; and since knowledge is not possible without a fundamental similarity and reciprocal ordering between the knowing subject and the known object, the term *intentionality* also signifies the order or finality that obtains between subject and object, and in particular between thought and reality.
Ancient and recent studies have highlighted the possibility of a comprehensive theory of *intentionality*, which in St. Thomas embraces a multifaceted problematic and develops coherently in the same order in which the individual parts of philosophy are articulated. This theory first engages epistemology, which has the task of explicating and defending the realistic nature of human knowing, and thus of concluding that our intentional activity is naturally ordered to grasp as its proper object the real given in sensation. Once the legitimacy of the distinction between the intentional cognitive order and the real order is established, the theory of *intentionality* is enriched from the psychological standpoint by a deeper explanation of the *intentionality* of the subject: the intentional union is realized through the *verbum mentis*, by which the intellect in act is identified with the understanding in act. In this sense, the intellect, immediate in the logical order, is realized as mediation in the psychological order, insofar as knowing simultaneously touches “the first word and primarily the thing” (*cf.* Sum. Theol., 1a, q. 85, a. 2); a distinction of great importance, for it enables us to understand how St. Thomas can consistently apply the term *intentio* both to the reality toward which the word tends and to the word by which the intellect tends toward reality, thereby grounding the aforementioned distinction between *prima* and *secunda intentio*. If *intentionality* formally originates from and in the subject, nothing prevents the object, by extension and correlation, from being called *intentional* as well. The philosophy of nature further determines what the *intentionality* of the object is, for it is incumbent upon this discipline not only to corroborate the intuitive nature of sense perception but also to establish the nature of the activity of material reality, which, through a medium, attains sensation. This “medium” is immediately produced by the complex of sensible agents and thus lacks the initial immateriality that must be attributed to sense. To explain the immateriality of sensation, the immateriality of the sensitive power suffices. Yet one cannot simply dismiss the speculative intuition of St. Thomas, who saw in the “medium” a *intentio fluens*, as a proportionate fruit of the generic ordering that the complex of material agents has toward sense and intellect, and which is part of the harmonious similarity among all parts of the universe, insofar as the universe is constituted and developed under the influence of its First Orderer and Mover. In this way, the theory of *intentionality* is led to transcend the study of immediate finalities in order to ascend to the study of the ultimate end, drawing on all the resources of metaphysics, and in particular on the metaphysics of the intelligible and the intelligent.
There appears to be a gnoseological path that can reach God by following the direction of created *intentionality*: not in the sense of the futile Cartesian attempt to ascend to God only to descend to the quiddity of sensible things, which are the proportionate and immediate object of human knowledge, but in the sense that the ultimate explanation of the various aspects of human and cosmological *intentionality* can be found only in God, in whom Being and Thought are identical. This most pure divine Unity is participated by us in two distinct orders: the ontic order of being and the logical order of knowing. Just as both of these orders are realized under the influence of the First Efficient Cause, so proportionally they are realized under the influence of the Ultimate Final Cause. In the ontic order, every thing tends toward its proportionate and immediate end, and does so insofar as it is subject to the causality of the Ultimate End, without which nothing would move. The same observation holds in the logical order when it is considered as part of the ontic order. Insofar as it stands opposed to the ontic order and constitutes itself as a distinct order, it must be said that every act of our knowledge formally intends the proper and immediate object and virtually intends the ultimate object, which we can only reach by demonstration. The lofty fantasy of Plato (who imagined an almost immediate participation of our intentional order with subsistent intelligible reality) can never be a philosophical truth: only faith teaches us that such may sometimes be the case in supernatural intuition. Yet this does not prevent the philosopher from explaining how, once God is found, natural knowing opens the legitimate path to the *intentionality* of natural love, which strengthens and empowers all our activities.
The Thomistic theory of *intentionality*, with its original and vigorous insights, makes manifold contributions to contemporary philosophical problems. First, it serves to highlight how immediate realism can harmonize the productive spontaneity of the subject with the normative activity of the object in the constitution of the concrete act of knowing. Second, while enabling us to demonstrate the fundamental intellectualism that permeates philosophical inquiry, it also allows us to understand and clarify the problem of *intentionality* as it is posed by Brentano (*v.*), Husserl (*v.*), Max Scheler (*v.*), and down to the most recent currents of voluntarist and existential dynamism. It may be added that *intentionality* also signifies finality and appetite, and as such is valid not only in the natural order but also in the supernatural. In this sense, it may be concluded that theology too can legitimately develop its own theory of *intentionality*, utilizing and analogizing the manifold contributions of philosophy.