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Franz Brentano |
The foundation of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology rests on three concepts: description, phenomenon, and intentionality. Rather than discussing awareness of the world as consciousness, he discusses intentionality. This means that consciousness is not a thing but an attention towards something. Intentionality reveals the paradox that we can think about the concept of nothing. When we think about nothing, “nothing” becomes an intentional concept. Intentionality is the directed awareness of a sensed stimulus (bottom-up processing in cognitive psychology terminology) or an imagined concept (top-down processing). Whereas early experimental psychology focused on the structure of consciousness as a measurable and observable object (Titchener’s structuralism), while Husserl’s phenomenology concentrated on awareness of some object or imagined concept.