Abstract:

The starting question of my lecture is: What are intentions? Different to the use of this concept within common languages, where it means simply to act according to plans or to pursue an aim, there exists another meaning that comes from philosophy. Based on the ontological difference between the physical that is extended, has a shape, size and so forth, the mental is not extended, has no physical shape, size and so forth, but has intentional content according to Franz Brentano. That your thoughts do have content is due to the intentional feature of the mental. Ontologically the feature of the mental is its intentionality. Only in analytic or armchair philosophy intentionality became defined as the semantic notion of languages in terms of aboutness in the way John Searle defined it. The latter does not allow for genuine intentions, because languages are common means and the additional thesis of analytic philosophy that the mind can become completely investigated in term of an investigation of languages.

Now the questions arise:
What are genuine intention?
Why are genuine intentions essential for the identity of a person over time?
What does “identity of a person over time” mean?
Why the self cannot be a fiction of grammar?
Why the identity of a person over time cannot be replaced by some kind of survival of a person over time?
Why ontologically the mental cannot be reduced to languages or information processing?
Why is the use of languages of the various kinds – natural languages, formal languages, music, colours and lines and so forth – not reducible to information processing?

What is genuinely human?

To explain the core issue two paradoxes will be formulated: The benign Eckermann-paradox and the malign Smith-paradox. The latter exemplifies the situation of the destroyed transmodern subject.