(redirected from Second Intention)

Alteration of Instruments





Material Changes





Time of Alteration




The Person Making the Change


Consensual Alteration




Collins Dictionary of Law © W.J. Stewart, 2006


References in periodicals archive ?
The difference between first and second intention was generally misunderstood by epistemologists of the early modem period.(38) In particular, they assumed that the intelligible species, precisely as representative representative of another, was the immediate term of cognitive experience.
The knower is therefore rightly understood to grasp the real in its own proper intelligibility and to contribute nothing to experience except to constitute it as an object known.(54) Even this constitution only becomes apparent to the intellect by way of reflection upon the content of thought in second intention. The "being known" posited in the object is recognized in an afterthought, as it were; though present concurrently with the immediate grasp of the thing, it cannot itself be known except in second intention.
Consequently it seems inevitable to conclude that both are entia rationis and "second intentions," though not of the same kind.
Giles granted that mathematical notions are second intentions, in the sense that our way of knowing mathematical entities in abstraction from sensible and qualitative matter depends on the mind and not on reality.
(This relation is not a real relation, but is a being of reason that arises from the act of understanding.) This central claim, repeated throughout the treatise, is the basis for many of Hervaeus's positions concerning second intentions. In contrast to the familiar contemporary understanding of intentionality, Hervaeus does not understand intentionality as the character of mental acts insofar as they are about objects, but as the relation of an understood thing to the intellect and its act.
As Pini notes, moreover, views such as those of Kilwardby and Albertus, who propose respectively that logic is a science of speech and that logic is a study of argument or inference, were gradually infused with the notion taken from Avicenna that logic deals with second intentions. The need to account for the distinction between metaphysics (the science that deals with first intentions such as being and the ontological categories) and logic (considered to deal with, if not always to have as its subject, second intentions) caused medieval interpreters to outline various theories of second intentions and amply justifies Pini's own protracted discussion of theories of second intentions (chapters 2 and 3).
144-7); logic, on the other hand, is described as dealing with entia rationis or second intentions and a logical understanding of the categories consists in understanding ontological categories as subject to second intentions (p.

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