Franz Brentano

Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano (January 16, 1838, Marienberg am Rhein, near Boppard – March 17, 1917, Zürich) was a philosopher and psychologist. His contributions ranged over wide areas of philosophy, but the primary contribution was a philosophy of mind in a broad sense. He received influences from Aristotle, Scholasticism, and positivism of nineteenth century. Brentano was a charismatic teacher and had a number of notable students including Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Kasimir Twardowski, and others.

A number of his ideas such as the concept of intentiality which he derived from the Scholasticism and the concept of philosophy as a study of consciousness gave direct impacts on Husserl. Early Husserl’s formulation of phenomenology was based upon these ideas from Brentano.

Life

Franz Brentano grew up under Roman Catholicism and studied philosophy at the universities of Munich, Würzburg, Berlin (with Adolf Trendelenburg) and Münster. He had a special interest in Aristotle and scholastic philosophy, and wrote his dissertation in Tübingen On the manifold sense of Being in Aristotle which later gave impacts on Martin Heidegger.

Subsequently he began to study theology and entered the seminary in Munich and then Würzburg, preparing to become a Roman Catholic priest (ordained August 6, 1864). In 1865–1866, he wrote and defended his habilitation essay and theses and began to lecture at the University of Würzburg. His students in this period included, among others, Carl Stumpf and Anton Marty.

Between 1870 and 1873, Brentano was heavily involved in the debate on papal infallibility. A strong opponent of such dogma, he eventually gave up his priesthood. Following Brentano's religious struggles, Stumpf (who was studying at the seminar at the time) was also drawn away from the church.

In 1874 Brentano published his major work: "Psychology from an empirical standpoint" and from 1874 to 1895 he taught at the University of Vienna. Among his students were Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Rudolf Steiner and many others. While he began his career as a full ordinary professor, he was forced to give up his Austrian citizenship and his professorship in 1880 to be able to marry. Austro-Hungarian Empire did not allow a marriage of someone who had been an ordained priest. He was permitted to return to the university only as a Privatdozent.

After his retirement he moved to Florence in Italy and at the outbreak of the First World War he transferred to Zürich, where he died in 1917. At the last years of his life, Brentano gradually developed eye illness and finally lost eyesight. He could not read and write. His wife read books for him and dictated what he spoke. Brentano still produced his works with the help of his wife until his death.

Work and thought

Intentionality

Brentano is best known for his reintroduction of the concept of intentionality—a concept derived from scholastic philosophy—to contemporary philosophy in his lectures and in his work Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkte (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint). While often simplistically summarised as "aboutness" or the relationship between mental acts and the external world, Brentano defined it as the main characteristic of psychical phenomena, by which they could be distinguished from physical phenomena. Every mental phenomenon, every psychological act has a content, is directed at an object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire etc. has an object that they are about: the believed, the wanted. Brentano used the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the status of the objects of thought in the mind. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to distinguish psychical phenomena and physical phenomena, because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether.

Theory of perception

He is also well known for claiming that Wahrnehmung ist Falschnehmung ('perception is misception' or literally 'truth-grasping is false-grasping') that is to say perception is erroneous. In fact he maintained that external, sensory perception could not tell us anything about the de facto existence of the perceived world, which could simply be illusion. However, we can be absolutely sure of our internal perception. When I hear a tone, I cannot be completely sure that there is a tone in the real world, but I am absolutely certain that I do hear. This awareness, of the fact that I hear, is called internal perception. External perception, sensory perception, can only yield hypotheses about the perceived world, but not truth. Hence he and many of his pupils (in particular Carl Stumpf and Edmund Husserl) thought that the natural sciences could only ever yield hypotheses and not universal, absolute truths as in pure logic or mathematics.

Philosophy as a Rigorous Science

Brentano attempted to formulate philosophy as a “rigorous science.” He found the rigor of natural sciences in their methodology. Similarly to positivism, Brentano argued, empirical evidence was necessary for the validation of knowledge. He took a field of consciousness as the area of philosophical studies and “direct experience” as the evidence. While extra-mental events were dubious to a cognitive subject, experientially given were certain without question. This terrain of thought, that certainty was limited to what was given to mind and extra-mental events were dubious, was rooted in Descartes. In contrast to behabiorist psychology which was build on the analyses of external behavioral patters of human actions, Brentano developed descriptive psychology as a descriptive study of mental phenomena based upon the introspection. Nevertheless, Brentano’s concept of self was solipsistic, which was a continuation of Descartes’ concept.

Brentano and Husserl

Husserl was the founder of Phenomenology, a major philosophical movement in the continental tradition in the twentieth century philosophy. A number of ideas in Brentano directly influenced the formulation of phenomenology by Husserl.

Early Husserl conceived philosophy or phenomenology as a “rigorous science.” Similarly to Brentano, Husserl took the field of consciousness as the area of studies, and developed phenomenology as an extension of descriptive psychology. While Brentano conceived philosophy in parallel to psychology, Husserl made a clear distinction between them. Husserl defined philosophy or phenomenology as a study of “essence” in the given mental phenomena. For Husserl, natural sciences were the studies of natural facts, philosophy or phenomenology was a study of essences given in experiences. Brentano explicitly criticized Husserl’s essentialist orientation.

The concept of intentionality, philosophy of time as a study of internal time consciousness were also central to Husserlian phenomenology. Both of these ideas were developed by Brentano and Husserl integrated them into his phenomenology.

Brentano, however, limited the sphere of consciousness to what were given to the self through introspection. The solipsistic stance was carried over to early Husserl’s formulation of phenomenology. Husserl, however, realized the limit of this solipsistic orientation. This solipsism of both Brentano and Husserl were both rooted in Descartes. Husserl departed from his earlier solipsistic orientation, which he inherited from Brebtano, and began to pursue the concept of the self within the social contexts one lived in, which he called “life-world.”

References
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Major works by Brentano

(1874) Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt)
(1889) The Origin of our Knowledge of Right and Wrong
(1911) Aristotle and his World View (Aristoteles und seine Weltanschauung)
(1911) The Classification of Mental Phenomena (Die Klassifikation von Geistesphänomenen)
(1976) Philosophical Investigations on Space, Time and Phenomena (Philosophische Untersuchungen zu Raum, Zeit und Kontinuum)
(1982) Descriptive Psychology (Deskriptive Psychologie)

Selected works in English

Primary Sources

Brentano, Franz Clemens Aristotle and his world view Berkeley : University of California Press, 1978
--------, Descriptive psychology New York : Routledge, 1995
--------, On the several senses of being in Aristotle Berkeley : University of California Press, 1975
--------, Psychology from an empirical standpointNew York, Humanities Press, 1973

Secondary sources

Chisholm, Roderick M. Brentano and intrinsic value New York : Cambridge University Press, 1986
Jacquette, Dale. The Cambridge companion to Brentano New York : Cambridge University Press, 2004
McAlister, Linda L. The Philosophy of Brentano Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press, 1977
Rancurello, Antos C. A study of Franz Brentano; his psychological standpoint and his significance in the history of psychology New York, Academic Press, 1968
Smith, Barry. Austrian philosophy: the legacy of Franz Brentano Chicago : Open Court, 1994

External links

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
- Entry on Franz Brentano
- Entry on Brentano's Theory of Judgement
The Ontology of Franz Brentano Contains a list of the English translations of Brentano's works

General Philosophy Sources

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