In this paper, I want to revive an old proposal regarding the venerable issue of the mark of the mental, i.e., the quest for both necessary and jointly sufficient conditions in order for something—primarily a state, but also an event, or even a property—to be mental. This quest was originally revived by Brentano when he held that intentionality plays that role. First of all, however, against both Brentano and the intentionalist account stemming from him, I remind that intentionality cannot be such a mark; nor can other traditional proposals coming from the phenomenological tradition, both Brentano and Husserl (Sec. 2). For me, moreover (Sec. 3), the best candidate is the old Cartesian-Husserlian property of being an experience, taken as the property for something, primarily a state, of having a phenomenal character, whether sensuous or not, hence for that something to be phenomenally aware: in a nutshell, something is mental iff it is an experience. Finally (Sec. 4), I try to undermine what seems to be the main drawback for this other traditional candidate; namely, its ruling out of the realm of the mental certain unconscious internal intentional states, in the sense of phenomenally unaware internal states, either…
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