BRENTANO, FRANZ

BRENTANO, FRANZ (1838–1917), German-Austrian philosopher.

A revolutionary figure in empiricist European philosophy at the turn of the century, Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano is most famously associated with his distinction between psychological and physical phenomena on the basis of the "aboutness" or intentionality of thought. Brentano championed an Aristotelian approach to philosophy and psychology. He developed ethics and value theory by means of the concepts of correct pro- and anti-emotions or love and hate attitudes, and he made important contributions to syllogistic logic (unpublished during his lifetime), epistemology or theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. His teaching prepared the way for rigorous approaches to philosophy of science and theory of meaning in the later work of the so-called Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists, as well as on Gestalt and other branches of experimental psychology, the theory of objects (Gegenstandstheorie), and descriptive philosophical psychology or phenomenology. Lecturing first in Würzburg, Germany, and later in Vienna, Austria, Brentano's ideas touched many important thinkers who self-consciously considered themselves as constituting a Brentano School. The philosophers and psychologists of note who were part of the Brentano orbit included such leading lights of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as Alexius Meinong, Ernst Mally, Alois Höfler, Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Frans Weber, Kazimierz Twardowski, Christian von Ehrenfels, Edmund Husserl, and Sigmund Freud.

Between 1859 and 1860, Brentano attended the Academy in Münster, reading intensively in the medieval Aristotelians, and receiving in 1862 the doctorate in philosophy in absentia from the University of Tübingen. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1864 and was later involved in a controversy over the doctrine of papal infallibility, eventually leaving the church in 1873. He taught first as Privatdozent in the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Würzburg from 1866 to 1874, and then accepted a professorship at the University of Vienna, which he held until 1880. After the death of his wife in 1893, Brentano left Vienna in 1895 and retired to Italy, spending summers in the Austrian Danube valley, and finally relocating to Zurich, Switzerland, shortly before Italy entered World War I. Here he remained active both in philosophy and psychology, despite his increasing blindness. He continued writing philosophy, and maintained an extensive philosophical-literary correspondence until his death from complications following the relapse of an appendicitis attack.

In Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874; Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint), Brentano argues that intentionality is the mark of the mental, that every psychological experience has contained immanently within it an intended object that the thought is about or toward which the thought is directed. To consider just one of Brentano's examples, in desire something is desired. According to the immanent intentionality thesis, this means that the desired object is literally contained within the psychological experience of desire. Brentano holds that this is uniquely true of mental as opposed to physical or nonpsychological phenomena, so that the intentionality of the psychological distinguishes mental from physical states. The immanent intentionality thesis provides a framework in which Brentano identifies three categories of psychological phenomena: presentations (Vorstellungen), judgments (Urteilen), and emotions (Gefühle).

In the period from 1905 through 1911, with the publication in the latter year of Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene (On the classification of psychical phenomena), Brentano abandoned the immanent intentionality thesis according to which intended objects are contained within the thoughts that intend them in favor of his later philosophy of reism, according to which only individuals exist, excluding putative nonexistent irrealia, such as lacks, absences, and mere possibilities. In the meantime, his students Twardowski, Meinong, and Husserl, reacting negatively to the psychologism and related philosophical problems apparent in the early immanent intentionality thesis, developed alternative nonimmanence approaches to intentionality, leading in the case of Twardowski and Meinong and his students in the Graz school of phenomenological psychology to the construction of a theory of (transcendent existent and nonexistent intended) objects, and to Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. The intentionality of the mental in Brentano's revival of this medieval Aristotelian doctrine is one of his most important contributions to contemporary nonmechanistic theories of mind, meaning, and expression. Brentano's doctrine of immanent intentionality was rejected by philosophers who otherwise agreed with his underlying claim that thought is essentially object-directed, and who used Brentano's thesis as a springboard to further philosophical investigations that have influenced the subsequent history of Continental and intentionalist analytic philosophy. Through his impact on Freud, Brentano additionally exerted a profound effect on psychology, psychoanalytic theory and practice, and consequently on the scientific, literary, and artistic traditions that followed in its wake. Through the more widely read works of Husserl and above all Freud, Brentano indirectly influenced the course of modernist literature, exemplified among many others by the writings of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Robert Musil, and John Dos Passos. Brentano continues in this sense to contribute to the uniquely introspective outlook that has shaped all of contemporary culture.

See alsoFreud, Sigmund; Husserl, Edmund; Modernism; Vienna.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Brentano, Franz. On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. Edited and translated by Rolf George. Berkeley, Calif., 1975. Translation of Von der mannifgachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (1862).

——. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Translated by Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister. Introduction by Peter Simons. 2nd ed. London, 1973. Translation of Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874); 2nd ed. 1924.

Secondary Sources

Albertazzi, Lilian, Massimo Libardi, and Roberto Poli, eds. The School of Franz Brentano. Dordrecht, Boston, and London, 1996. Essays on Brentano's work and that of his students influenced by his contributions to philosophy and psychology.

Chisholm, Roderick M. Brentano and Meinong Studies. Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1982. Anthology of papers on Brentano's epistemology and value theory and of Brentano's student Alexius Meinong from one of the premier Brentano scholars of the twentieth century.

Jacquette, Dale. "Fin de Sie'cle Austrian Thought and the Rise of Scientific Philosophy." History of European Ideas 27 (2001): 307–315. Exploration of Brentano's role in supplanting neo-post-Kantian transcendentalism by scientific Aristotelian empiricism in turn of the twentieth century Austrian philosophy.

——. "Brentano's Scientific Revolution in Philosophy." Southern Journal of Philosophy, Spindel Conference Supplement, 40 (2002): 193–221. Spindel Conference 2001, Origins: The Common Sources of Analytic and Phenomenological Traditions. Critical evaluation of Brentano's descriptive psychology and the methodological problems encountered by his efforts to ground a new science of phenomenology in first-person inner perception.

Jacquette, Dale, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Brentano. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2004. Historical and philosophical essays on Brentano's philosophy, with special emphasis on his intentionality thesis, descriptive psychology, metaphysics, theory of knowledge, value theory, and philosophical theology.

Johnston, William M. The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938. Berkeley, Calif., 1972. Insightful introduction to the scientific and philosophical background of intellectual traditions associated with the Austrian Habsburg empire.

McAlister, Linda L., ed. The Philosophy of Brentano. London, 1976. Collection of recollections, biographical sketches and critical essays on Brentano's philosophy from his students, contemporaries, and later thinkers.

Poli, Roberto, ed. The Brentano Puzzle. Aldershot, U.K., and Brookfield, Vt., 1998. Conference proceedings on Brentano's philosophy; the "puzzle" refers to Brentano's importance to subsequent philosophy and at the same time his near invisibility when compared with other more frequently discussed philosophers of the period.

Smith, Barry. Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano. Chicago, 1994. Detailed discussion of Brentano's intentionality thesis and metaphysics, with separate chapters on principal members of the Brentano school.

Srzednicki, Jan. Franz Brentano's Analysis of Truth. The Hague, 1965. Detailed analysis of Brentano's concept of truth in the context of his empiricist psychology and epistemology.

Dale Jacquette