Time and Intentionality : editors’ Introduction

Abstract

In the Fall of 2016, an international conference took place at Université de Montréal to reflect on the relation between the concepts of intentionality and time. Although the topic of intentionality has been very intensely investigated both within the analytic and the phenomenological traditions throughout the past century, little systematic work has been done with regard to intentionality’s temporal dimension per se. Our goal with this special issue – which contains a selection of the papers presented at the conference – is to contribute to correct this shortcoming in the current philosophical literature. At least four main research trends on intentionality can be discerned in the contemporary philosophical landscape, and they all open promising avenues for new, original research with respect to time: (1) Phenomenal Intentionality, (2) Affective Intentionality, (3) Social Intentionality, and (4) Embodied Intentionality. What follows is a brief general thematic overview of these four subsets of problems, together with some of our questions and hypotheses as to how they relate to the overall issue of time. Along the way, we present the papers contained in this special issue.