Intentional being denotes a mode of being of its own for entities that exist only as objects of intentional acts. Roman Ingarden described them as “purely intentional objects”; Josef Seifert in 2014 highlights them as an independent mode of being alongside real, ideal, possible, and logical being.
Examples of intentional being: fictional persons such as Don Quixote or Hamlet, juridical persons such as corporations and foundations, narrative entities in literary works. These are dependent in their being on a conscious act or a unit of meaning. If they are no longer thought, read, or legally constituted, they vanish as such.
Bioethical consequence for the concept of person: The person in the strict sense exists exclusively in real being (German) — not in intentional being. A “juridical person” is therefore not a person in the personal-ontological sense, but an intentional construct. This distinction blocks the rhetorical strategy of granting AI systems the status of persons on the basis of functional analogies.
According to Seifert, the five modes of being (real, ideal, possible, intentional, logical) mutually exclude one another: one and the same entity cannot exist in two of these modes at once.
Ontological classification:
- Superordinate concept: mode of being
- Disjoint with: real being (German), ideal being (German), possible being (German), logical being
Ontological relations:
- persons do not exist in intentional being (the person’s mode of being is restricted to real being)
Chapter assignment: Chapter 4: What Is Human Personhood? (German)
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Seifert, J. (2014): Ontological Categories: On Their Distinction from Transcendentals, Modes of Being, and Logical Categories, Anuario Filosófico 47(2), pp. 341–343.
- Ingarden, Roman: The Controversy over the Existence of the World, vols. I–II, transl. Arthur Szylewicz. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013/2016. (German orig.: Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1964/65.)
See also:
- Mode of Being
- Real Being (German)
- Logical Being
- Person