Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Josef Brentano (/brɛnˈtɑːnoʊ/;German:[bʁɛnˈtaːno]; 16 January 1838 – 17 March 1917) was a German philosopher andpsychologist. His 1874Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, considered hismagnum opus, is credited with having reintroduced the medievalscholastic concept ofintentionality into contemporary philosophy.
Originally aCatholic priest, Brentano withdrew from the priesthood in 1873 due to thedogmatic definition ofpapal infallibility inPastor aeternus. Working subsequently as a non-denominational professor, his teaching triggered research in a wide array of fields such as linguistics, logic, mathematics and experimental psychology through the young generation of philosophers who were gathered as theSchool of Brentano.
Brentano was born atMarienberg am Rhein [de], nearBoppard. He was son ofChristian Brentano, brother ofLujo Brentano, and paternal nephew ofClemens Brentano andBettina von Arnim, and ofGunda (née Brentano) andFriedrich von Savigny. His paternal grandfather was ofItalian descent, and some of his ancestors areSophie von La Roche andJohann Philipp Stadion, Count von Warthausen.
He studiedphilosophy at the universities ofMunich,Würzburg,Berlin (withAdolf Trendelenburg) andMünster. He had a special interest inAristotle andscholastic philosophy. He wrote his dissertation in 1862 atTübingen under the titleVon der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle). His thesis advisor wasFranz Jakob Clemens.[9] Subsequently, he began to studytheology and entered the seminary in Munich and then Würzburg. He was ordained a Catholic priest on 6 August 1864.
In 1866 he defended hishabilitation thesis,Die Psychologie des Aristoteles, insbesondere seine Lehre vom Nous Poietikos (The Psychology of Aristotle, in Particular His Doctrine of the Active Intellect, published 1867), and began to lecture at theUniversity of Würzburg. His students in this period included, among others,Carl Stumpf andAnton Marty. Between 1870 and 1873, Brentano was heavily involved in the debate onpapal infallibility in matters of Faith. A strong opponent of suchdogma, he eventually gave up his priesthood and his tenure in 1873. He remained, however, deeply religious[10] and dealt with the topic of the existence of God in lectures given at the Universities of Würzburg and Vienna.[11]
In 1874 Brentano published his major work,Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. From 1874 to 1895 he taught at theUniversity of Vienna,Austria-Hungary. Among his students wereEdmund Husserl,Sigmund Freud,Tomáš Masaryk,Rudolf Steiner,Alexius Meinong,Carl Stumpf,Anton Marty,Kazimierz Twardowski, andChristian von Ehrenfels and many others (seeSchool of Brentano for more details). While he began his career as a full ordinary professor, he was forced to give up both his Austrian citizenship and his professorship in 1880 in order to marry Ida Lieben (Austro-Hungarian law denied matrimony to persons who had been ordained priests even if they later had resigned from priesthood), but he was permitted to stay at the university only as aPrivatdozent. After the departure of Twardowski back to Lwów and the death of his wife in 1894, Brentano retired and moved toFlorence in 1896, where he married his second wife, Emilie Ruprecht, in 1897. He transferred toZürich at the outbreak of theFirst World War, where he died in 1917.
Brentano is best known for his reintroduction of the concept ofintentionality—a concept derived fromscholastic philosophy—tocontemporary philosophy in his lectures and in his workPsychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (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 ofmental phenomena, by which they could be distinguished fromphysical phenomena. Every mental phenomenon, every psychological act has content, is directed at an object (theintentional object). Every belief, desire etc. has an object that they are about: the believed, the desired. 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 psychological phenomena and physical phenomena, because, as Brentano defined it, physical phenomena lacked the ability to generateoriginal intentionality, and could only facilitate an intentional relationship in a second-hand manner, which he labeledderived intentionality.
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We could, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.— Franz Brentano,Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, edited by Linda L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995 [1874]), pp. 88–89.
Brentano introduced a distinction betweengenetic psychology (genetische Psychologie) anddescriptive psychology (beschreibende ordeskriptive Psychologie):[12] in his terminology, genetic psychology is the study of psychological phenomena from a third-person point of view, which involves the use of empirical experiments (satisfying, thus, the scientific standards we nowadays expect of an empirical science).[6] (This concept is roughly equivalent to what is now calledempirical psychology,[13]cognitive science,[13] or "heterophenomenology", an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study ofconsciousness.) The aim of descriptive psychology, on the other hand, is to describe consciousness from a first-person point of view.[6] The latter approach was further developed by Husserl and thephenomenological tradition.[14]
He is also well known for claiming thatWahrnehmung ist Falschnehmung ('perception is misconception') that is to say perception is erroneous. In fact he maintained that external,sensory perception could not tell us anything about thede 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 particularCarl Stumpf andEdmund Husserl) thought that the natural sciences could only yield hypotheses and never universal, absolute truths as in purelogic ormathematics.
However, in a reprinting of hisPsychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkte (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint), he recanted this previous view. He attempted to do so without reworking the previous arguments within that work but it has been said that he was wholly unsuccessful. The new view states that when we hear a sound, we hear something from the external world; there are no physical phenomena of internal perception.[15]
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Brentano has a theory of judgment which is different from what is currently the predominant (Fregean) view. At the centre of Brentano's theory of judgment lies the idea that a judgment depends on having apresentation, but this presentation does not have to be predicated. Even stronger: Brentano thought thatpredication is not even necessary for judgment, because there are judgments without a predicational content. Another fundamental aspect of his theory is that judgments are alwaysexistential. This so-called existential claim implies that when someone is judging that S is P he/she is judging that some S that is P exists. (Note that Brentano denied the idea that all judgments are of the form: S is P [and all other kinds of judgment which combine presentations]. Brentano argued that there are also judgments arising from a single presentation, e.g. “the planet Mars exists” has only one presentation.) In Brentano's own symbols, a judgment is always of the form: ‘+A’ (A exists) or ‘–A’ (A does not exist).
Combined with the third fundamental claim of Brentano, the idea that all judgments are either positive (judging that A exists) or negative (judging that A does not exist), we have a complete picture of Brentano's theory of judgment. So, imagine that you doubt whether midgets exist. At that point you have a presentation of midgets in your mind. When you judge that midgets do not exist, then you are judging that the presentation you have does not present something that exists. You do not have to utter that in words or otherwise predicate that judgment. The whole judgment takes place in the denial (or approval) of the existence of the presentation you have.
The problem of Brentano's theory of judgment is not the idea that all judgments are existential judgments (though it is sometimes a very complex enterprise to transform an ordinary judgment into an existential one), the real problem is that Brentano made no distinction betweenobject and presentation. A presentation exists as an object in your mind. So you cannot really judge that A does not exist, because if you do so you also judge that the presentation is not there (which is impossible, according to Brentano's idea that all judgments have the object which is judged as presentation).Kazimierz Twardowski acknowledged this problem and solved it by denying that the object is equal to the presentation. This is actually only a change within Brentano's theory of perception, but has a welcome consequence for the theory of judgment, viz. that you can have a presentation (which exists) but at the same time judge that the object does not exist.
The youngMartin Heidegger was very much inspired by Brentano's early workOn the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle.Brentano's focus on conscious (or phenomenal) intentionality was inherited byCarl Stumpf'sBerlin School of experimental psychology,Anton Marty'sPrague School of linguistics,Alexius Meinong'sGraz School of experimental psychology,Kazimierz Twardowski'sLwów School of philosophy, andEdmund Husserl'sphenomenology.[16] Brentano's work also influencedGeorge Stout,[17] the teacher ofG. E. Moore andBertrand Russell atCambridge University.[18]
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