Attention, Adumbration, and a Neglected Mark of the Mental

Brentano never investigated whether the ‘peculiar feature’ of inner perception—that it can never become inner observation—that distinguishes our awareness of the mental from other forms of perceptual awareness could serve as the mark of the mental. However, his students Stumpf and Husserl developed marks of the mental that are inspired by this idea. The chapter clarifies Husserl’s Thesis that mental phenomena have no appearances, argues that it is superior to Brentano’s Thesis, and defends it against objections from Reinach and Husserl himself. Husserl himself threw out the baby with the bathwater when he later rejected Husserl’s Thesis. A precisified form of this idea can still unify our intuitions about the mental.