Franz Brentano

Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano (January 16, 1838 Marienberg am Rhein (near Boppard) - March 17, 1917 Zürich) was an influential figure in both philosophy and psychology. His influence was felt by other figures such as Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong who followed and adapted Brentano's views.

Life

Franz Brentano studied philosophy at the universities of Munich, Würzburg, Berlin (with Adolf Trendelenburg) and Münster. He had a special interest in Aristotle and scholastic philosophy. He wrote his dissertation in Tübingen On the manifold sense of Being in Aristotle.

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 (see School of Brentano for more details). 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. 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.

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.

Although this may seem strange in view of the above, Brentano held the firm belief that the method of philosophy should be the method of the natural sciences.

Bibliography

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)

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

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