The medieval word intentionality was reintroduced into late nineteenth-century philosophy by Franz Clemens Brentano. Intentionality is the power of minds to represent, stand for, or be about things, properties, and states of affairs. The English word intentionality stems from the Latin verb intendere, which can be used to denote the act of stretching a bow string with the aim of propelling an arrow into its target. In Brentano's sense intentionality is the mental tension whereby the human mind aims at objects. The nature of intentionality has been a central topic in the philosophy of mind and language in the twentieth century in both the phenomenological tradition (founded by Edmund Husserl, a student of Brentano) and the analytic tradition.

In several well-known paragraphs from his 1874 classical work, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, quoted by Roderick M. Chisholm at the beginning of his entry, Brentano did two things...