# structuring the mind chapter 11 **Opening (not a real abstract):** Awareness of Attending Agentive Awareness and Introspective Knowledge 1 Outward Attention, Inward Awareness Franz Brentano, the nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist famous for reintroducing the notion of intentionality into the modern discussion, believed that by focusing our attention on parts of the natural world around us, we could also, incidentally, gain knowledge of our own mind. While he thought that we cannot directly observe our own experience, we are aware of that experience by observing the world (he called this awareness “inner perception”). Brentano writes: It is a universally valid psychological law that we can never focus our attention upon the object of inner perception [our own experience] . . . It is only while our attention is turned toward a different object that we are able to perceive, incidentally, the mental processes which are **Authors:** [[Agentive Awareness and Introspective]]