 The received view, which takes the notion to originate in Arabic philosophy, traces back to an article by the phenomenologist Herbert Spiegelberg, originally published in 1933 (for a translation of a revised version, see Spiegelberg 1976). It turns entirely on philosophical terminology: it only considers texts that use cognates of ‘intention’ in a specific technical sense, that of a mental act’s being directed at or referring to something, in contrast with a usage that applies exclusively to practical contexts, where an agent intends to do something. Spiegelberg claims that before the high scholastic period, uses of the Latin intentio were exclusively practical and so have no bearing on the problem of the intentionality of mental states more generally. The closest antecedents, he claims, are the Arabic ma’na and ma’qul, which were translated into Latin in the high scholastic period by intentio.