Studia philosophica 75/2016 17 Christian Barth Descartes on Intentionality, Conscientia, and Phenomenal Consciousness Does Descartes accept the phenomenal intentionality thesis as the thesis is presented in Terence Horgan’s and John Tienson’s 2002 article «Intentionality of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of Intentionality»? Raising this question, the paper intends to shed new light on Descartes’s conceptions of intentionality and conscientia. In addition, it attempts to identify the aspects of Descartes’s view of the mind that account for what we nowadays call «phenomenal consciousness». It turns out that it is an integral part of Descartes’s conception of intentionality that thinking sub- stances are conscious of their thoughts. However, the same is not generally true of the phenomenal character that Cartesian thoughts exhibit. Instead, at least in the case of sensory thoughts, the phenomenal character is determined by inner sensory objects that are «carried» by these thoughts, but that do not contribute to the thoughts’ intentionality. The upshot is that Descartes does not accept Horgan’s and Tienson’s phenomenal intentionality thesis since intentionality is not grounded in phenomenal character. Introduction In the first half of the 20 th century, it had been a commonplace in analytic philos- ophy that phenomenal consciousness and intentionality are independent mental features. They were taken to be independent in the sense of being marks of two distinct sets of mental episodes: sensory and propositional episodes. The set of sensory episodes was usually taken to comprise bodily feelings, sensations, emotions, and moods. Members of this set were often considered to be essentially phenom- enally conscious, but neither to be conceptual nor intentional. The set of propo- sitional episodes comprises cognitive, conative, and optative mental episodes such as judging that p, intending to bring about that p, and desiring that p. 1 They essen- tially consist of an attitude and a propositional content. Hence, they essentially are conceptual and intentional. According to this view, sensory and propositional episodes can occur together, but if they do, they do so only contingently. This 1 I use «ing»-forms in order to denote mental episodes rather than states.