This chapter discusses intention and presence in medieval philosophy. It introduces and analyses a high-level debate on intentionality
and the mode of presence of the object in the fourteenth century. The medieval philosophers discuss, among other things, the
notion of intentio as tending towards, as well as the difference between presence in the strict sense (the object being really present) and
presentiality, namely the mode in which an object (both present and absent) can be present to a thinker or a mind. In addition
to introducing dilemmas which, later, triggered the modern scholarship on intentionality through Franz Brentano, the medieval
particularities become apparent in the article. For instance, before William of Ockham the philosophers insist on a symmetry
or reversibility of the intentional relation: the subject’s tending towards the object is matched by the object’s presence
to the subject, and the conscious subject is thus not given any focal significance in the inquiry