Uriah Kriegel (Jean Nicod, Paris)

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April 21 FRI — 11.30-14.30

Sala "Enzo Paci" — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)

The Phenomenal Intentionality of Mood

Moods are sometimes thought to constitute the sole exception to the thesis that all mental phenomena are intentional: their phenomenal character is said to be diffuse and undirected, in a way that rules out a characterization in intentional terms. This paper considers three attempts to provide an intentional account of moods after all – two already present in the extant literature, and a novel third one. It is not part of the three accounts’ task to ‘ready’ moods for physicalist reduction in terms of tracking relations; the notion of intentionality they appeal to is inherently phenomenal. Rather, the accounts merely seek to offer an informative characterization of mood phenomenology. The first account, which I call ‘global intentionalism,’ claims that the diffuse character of moods is due to the fact that they represent the world as a whole, or everything indiscriminately, without representing anything in particular. The second account, which I call ‘objectless intentionalism,’ claims instead that moods owe their diffuse character to the fact that they represent ‘unbound properties,’ that is, properties that are not any thing’s properties. The third account, which I call ‘impure intentionalism,’ does not attempt to characterize the diffuse character of moods in terms of what moods might represent, but rather in terms of how they represent, that is, in terms of a distinctive manner or mode in which they represent what (if anything) they represent. I argue that the first two accounts face severe difficulties which the third elegantly overcomes.