George Arabatzis abstract The Question of Intentionality in Michael of Ephesus Intentionality consists in the operation of attributing intentional properties to physical entities. A form of intentionality may be credited to Michael of Ephesus when, in his commentary on the book I of Aristotle’s Parts of Animals, he ascribes intentional properties – beliefs – to animals and plants, in the mode of ‘as if’. Michael of Ephesus, being the first, after many centuries, to have commented upon Aristotle’s biology was the most appropriate scholar to grasp the paradox of attributing to physical entities – living things –intentional properties. This idea of proto- intentionality in Michael of Ephesus is further stressed by his understanding of Aristotle’s encomium of biology in the same first book of PA. Still, the argument about intentionality can be more developed by situating Michael’s position of intentional properties both in his work and in Byzantine tradition. Some remarks in his Scholia and Glossae on Aristotle’s Politics as well as in other commentaries may be illuminating as to this point. The problem of the place of intentionality – i.e. the sources and the context – in Michael’s expression of the idea of intentionality is more difficult to elucidate. The idea of intentionality in Aristotle and the Neoplatonists is an open question for examination. If nominalism is somehow a response to the realist ambitions of the theory of intentionality, then Byzantine thought is said to stand in the middle between realism and nominalism and it is, in many ways, closer to rhetoric than to a theory of signification; in this perspective, the idea of proper names in the Greek Fathers of the Church is seen as expressing this middle position between realism and nominalism; Michael’s intentionality must be situated also in regard to this heritage. Finally, if one had to compare Michael of Ephesus’s use of intentionality with the ideas of a, more or less, contemporary thinker, this would concern specifically Michael Psellos’ intellectualism. Although Michael of Ephesus engages with intellectualist positions, he clearly takes some distance from them in the argument about intentional properties and also in his more general epistemic intents. .