The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose.
Yet the medium here is not so much the message as a magnet, one that snares our attention and compels us to sort through both the vivid details and the underlying layers of meaning, intention and process.
It can elevate even the most mundane things we do each day by instilling them with meaning, intention, and narrative power.
Where we use the verb "to enact" as well as its conjugations and cognates, we intend it as content-agnostic – by saying that a person enacted some particular movement, whether physically or imaginatively, we deliberately wish to avoid ascribing or not to that movement epistemic appendages such as understanding, meaning, intention, or grounding.
It conveys the full range of our feelings often with subtlety and nuance, it carries meaning, intention and expression more than the actual words we choose.
The one rabbi who spoke as part of the Gala dinner, under the heading of "kavannah," meaning intention or focus, actually just gave another speech.
There's a particular interest I have in the teachings of Jesus and the Christian teachings because of the power in them, but also because of how profoundly misunderstood they are, and how corrupted they have become in terms of the real meaning, intention, purpose, and power.
Nevertheless, his understanding of the purpose, meaning, intentions, and context of The Federalist and its relationship to the US Constitution is so inaccurate, and so skewed to reflect presentist right-wing sentiments, as to be positively misleading.
It was, in other words, a kind of fiction or artistic construction, and as a result each of its details, whether big or small, subtle or crude, had to correspond to a meaning or an intention.
In comparison with these studies, our stimuli did not represent or even allude to actions from which a meaning or an intention could be directly inferred, but much lower-level parts or "primitives" of movements [24], [28], with some exemplars being easier to produce than others [32], [36].
Almost every hand that has approached the diary with the well-meaning intention of publicizing it has contributed to the subversion of history.
