 Aristotle is, however, keenly aware of the special character of intentional states. In fact, he excoriates his predecessors for failing to account for intentional states whose objects are not the causes that bring them about. In the second chapter of his essay On Memory and Recollection, he rejects the idea that thought extends, like a ray, to its object, because we “think in the same way even when they do not exist”: in such cases a ray will not work, since there won’t be anything for it to extend to (452b9–11). He goes further in his polemic On Ideas (81.25–82.1), when he rejects Platonic theories that take our thoughts to be of Platonic forms. Because such objects supposedly always exist, whether or not the individuals that fall under them do, this sort of theory evades the previous criticism: given such intermediaries, there is something thought can reach. But, Aristotle objects, they cannot account for the full range of thoughts we actually have, since we can think of particular individuals who no longer exist, like Socrates, and mythical creatures that “do not exist in any way at all,” like the hippocentaur. In such cases, there is no Platonic form that can serve as the object of thought: by the Platonists’ own lights, there is no form of Socrates or of Hippocentaur. So simply positing a special object of the same type as a Form won’t suffice. 