Gorgias' of Leontinoi arguments as an evidence for philosophical significance of problem about intentional identity

The article argues against the "Reasoned Indifference" strategy (as Walter Edelberg calls it), which is proposed by some semanicists to address the problem of intentional identity. Our argument complements Edelberg's one. Namely, we have offered an interpretation of the third argument from Gorgias's of Leontinoi treatise "On Non-Being", according to which the objects of each intentional act are isolated in the world, created by the agent, or even by the unique agent's act. This bring about not only intransitivity of thought of one agent / intentional act to another agent / intentional act, for example, by means of some signs - letters, speeches, gestures..,. but also this entails that it is absolute impossible for two agent / two intentional acts to deal with the one and same object, even if such transmission is not implicated. Thereby it is impossible: to increase the knowledge about the same intentional object (or add characteristics to it by deduction or any other procedure); to be aware of one's own cognitive acts (to introspect); to correlate the perceived object with the thought one; to connect the different perceptions to one and the same (thought, imagined...) object. All this is a serious challenge to epistemology. Undoubted depth of these problems shows that any attempts to ignore the well-justified impossibility of intentional identity simply as an amusing argument, that has nothing to do with either ancient or modern philosophical discussions, as proponents of the strategy of "Reasonable Indifference" propose, cannot be successful. The difficulties faced by modern semanicists - when they are trying to understand the conditions under which intentional objects are identical - are not accidental ones. On the contrary, those difficulties have a long and venerable history, being closely connected with skeptical, relativistic and holistic arguments.

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