Intentionality and the Intentional Object in the Early Husserl

This chapter challenges the widely held view that Husserl’s early account of intentionality was a simple and direct development of Brentano’s theory. Husserl’s theory developed as a response to the account of intentionality in Twardowski’s On the Content and Object of Presentations. The chapter argues that Twardowski thought Brentano’s theory inadequate to address Bolzano’s problem of objectless presentations and that Husserl’s account, which differs from both Brentano’s and Twardowski’s, satisfactorily addressed this problem. Later developments in Husserl’s theory, he concludes, were the result of attempting to address problems other than the Bolzano problem.