Franz Brentano
Dr. phil. hab. , 1866) | |
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Spouses |
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Era | |
Institutions | University of Würzburg (1866–1873) University of Vienna (1873–1895) |
Theses | |
Doctoral advisor | Franz Jakob Clemens (PhD thesis advisor) |
Other academic advisors | Adolf Trendelenburg |
Notable students | Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Tomáš Masaryk, Rudolf Steiner, Alexius Meinong, Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Kazimierz Twardowski, Christian von Ehrenfels |
Main interests | Ontology Psychology |
Notable ideas |
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Ecclesiastical career | |
Religion | Christianity |
Church | Catholic Church |
Ordained | 6 August 1864 |
Laicized | 1873 |
Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Josef Brentano (
Originally a
Life
Brentano was born at
In 1866 he defended his
In 1874 Brentano published his major work, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. From 1874 to 1895 he taught at the University of Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Among his students were Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Tomáš Masaryk, Rudolf Steiner, Alexius Meinong, Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Kazimierz Twardowski, and Christian von Ehrenfels 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 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 a Privatdozent. After the departure of Twardowski back to Lwów and the death of his wife in 1894, Brentano retired and moved to Florence in 1896, where he married his second wife, Emilie Ruprecht, in 1897. He transferred to Zürich at the outbreak of the First World War, where he died in 1917.
Work
Intentionality
Brentano is best known for his reintroduction of the concept of
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 between genetic psychology (genetische Psychologie) and descriptive psychology (beschreibende or deskriptive Psychologie):[17] 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 called empirical psychology,[18] cognitive science,[18] or "heterophenomenology", an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness.) 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 the phenomenological tradition.[19]
Theory of perception
He is also well known for claiming that Wahrnehmung ist Falschnehmung ('perception is misconception') that is to say perception is erroneous. In fact he maintained that external,
However, in a reprinting of his Psychologie 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.[20]
Theory of judgment
This section needs additional citations for verification. (March 2010) |
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 a presentation, but this presentation does not have to be predicated. Even stronger: Brentano thought that predication is not even necessary for judgment, because there are judgments without a predicational content. Another fundamental aspect of his theory is that judgments are always existential. 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 between
Legacy
The young Martin Heidegger was very much inspired by Brentano's early work On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. Brentano's focus on conscious (or phenomenal) intentionality was inherited by Carl Stumpf's
Bibliography
- Major works by Brentano in German
- (1862) On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (doctoral thesis)) (online)
- (1867) The Psychology of Aristotle (Die Psychologie des Aristoteles, insbesondere seine Lehre vom Nous Poietikos (habilitation thesis written in 1865/66)) (online)
- (1874) Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt) (Online)
- (1924–25) Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. Ed. Oskar Kraus, 2 vols. Leipzig: Meiner. ISBN 3-7873-0014-7[23]
- (1924–25) Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. Ed. Oskar Kraus, 2 vols. Leipzig: Meiner.
- (1876) Was für ein Philosoph manchmal Epoche macht (a work against Plotinus) (Online)
- (1889) The Origin of our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis) (1902 English edition online)
- (1911) Aristotle and his World View (Aristoteles und seine Weltanschauung)
- (1911) The Classification of Mental Phenomena (Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene)
- (1930) The True and the Evident (Wahrheit und Evidenz)
- (1976) Philosophical Investigations on Space, Time and Phenomena (Philosophische Untersuchungen zu Raum, Zeit und Kontinuum)
- (1982) Descriptive Psychology (Deskriptive Psychologie)
- Collected Works
- Sämtliche veröffentlichte Schriften in zehn Bänden (Collected Works in Ten Volumes, edited by Arkadiusz Chrudzimski and Thomas Binder), Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag (now Walter de Gruyter).
- 1. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte — Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene (2008)
- 2. Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie (2009)
- 3. Schriften zur Ethik und Ästhetik (2010)
- 4. Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (2014)
See also
- Analytic psychology (Dilthey)
- Analytic psychology (Stout)
- Axiological ethics
- Anna von Lieben (his sister-in-law)
- Robert von Lieben (his nephew)
- List of Austrian scientists
- List of Austrians
References
- ^ Franz Brentano – Britannica.com
- E. B. Titchener, "Brentano and Wundt: Empirical and Experimental Psychology", The American Journal of Psychology, 32(1) (Jan. 1921), pp. 108–120.
- ^ Robin D. Rollinger, Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, and Others on Mind and Object, Walter de Gruyter, 2008, p. 7.
- ^ Gestalt Theory: Official Journal of the Society for Gestalt Theory and Its Applications (GTA), 22, Steinkopff, 2000, p. 94: "Attention has varied between Continental Phenomenology (late Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) and Austrian Realism (Brentano, Meinong, Benussi, early Husserl)".
- ^ Robin D. Rollinger, Austrian Phenomenology: Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, and Others on Mind and Object, Walter de Gruyter, 2008, p. 114: "The fact that Brentano [in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint] speaks of a relation of analogy between physical phenomena and real things existing outside of the mind obviously indicates that he is a realist and not an idealist or a solipsist, as he may indeed be taken to at first glance. Rather, his position is a very extreme representational realism. The things which exist outside of our sensations, he maintains, are in fact to be identified with the ones we find posited in the hypotheses of natural sciences."
- ^ a b c d Huemer, Wolfgang. "Franz Brentano". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- ^ Brentano, F., Sensory and Noetic Consciousness: Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint III, International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
- ^ Biagio G. Tassone, From Psychology to Phenomenology: Franz Brentano's 'Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint' and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 307.
- ^ Franz Brentano: Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. Ed. Oskar Kraus, 2 vols. Leipzig: Meiner, 1924–25; ed. Mauro Antonelli. Heusenstamm: Ontos, 2008
- ^ Robin D. Rollinger, Husserl's Position in the School of Brentano, Phaenomenologica 150, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999, Chap. 2: "Husserl and Bolzano", p. 70.
- ^ Edoardo Fugali, Toward the Rebirth of Aristotelian Psychology: Trendelenburg and Brentano (2008).
- , History of Political Economy, Annual Supplement to vol. 22 (1990), 263–288.
- ^ a b Liliana Albertazzi, Immanent Realism: An Introduction to Brentano, Springer, 2006, p. 321.
- ^ Franz Brentano at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ Boltzmann, Ludwig. 1995. Ludwig Boltzmann: His Later Life and Philosophy, 1900-1906: Book Two: The Philosopher. Springer Science & Business Media, p. 3
- ^ Brentano, F. C. 1987. On the Existence of God: Lectures Given at the Universities of Würzburg and Vienna (1868-1891). Springer Science & Business Media,
- ^ The first published occurrence of the term is in Brentano's Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (The Origin of our Knowledge of Right and Wrong) published in 1889 (see Franz Brentano, Descriptive Psychology, Routledge, 2012, "Introduction").
- ^ a b Dale Jacquette (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brentano, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 67.
- ^ Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Phenomenology World-Wide: Foundations — Expanding Dynamics — Life-Engagements A Guide for Research and Study, Springer, 2014, p. 18: "[Husserl] entrusts this analysis to a pure or phenomenological psychology whose links with Brentano's descriptive psychology are still clearly visible."
- ISBN 0710074255, edited by Oskar Kraus; translated [from German] by Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell and Linda López McAlister; English edition edited by Linda López McAlister).
- ^ Uriah Kriegel, "Phenomenal intentionality past and present: introductory, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12(3):437–444 (2013).
- ^ Maria van der Schaar, G. F. Stout and the Psychological Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Springer, 2013, p. viii.
- ^ Franz Brentano Archiv Graz
External links
- https://www.brentanoandthearistoteliantradition.org/
- https://www.facebook.com/groups/5864284163632311
- Franz Brentano website
- "Franz Brentano and Cornelio Fabro. A forgotten chapter of the Brentanian reception" Archived 2016-03-24 at the Wayback Machine
- Huemer, Wolfgang. "Franz Brentano". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Brandl, Johannes. "Brentano's Theory of Judgement". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Franz Brentano's Ontology and His Immanent Realism – Contains a list of the English translations of Brentano's works and an annotated bibliography
- New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
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- Works by or about Franz Brentano at Internet Archive
- The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong by Franz Brentano at Project Gutenberg
- "Franz Brentano Archiv" (Franz Brentano Papers) at Graz University