## 1. Life and Work



Franz Brentano was born on January 16, 1838 in Marienberg am Rhein,
Germany, a descendent of a strongly religious German-Italian family of
intellectuals (his uncle Clemens Brentano and his aunt Bettina von
Arnim were among the most important writers of German Romanticism and
his brother Lujo Brentano became a leading expert in social
economics). He studied mathematics, poetry, philosophy, and theology
in Munich, Wurzburg, and Berlin. Already at high school he became
acquainted with Scholasticism; at university he studied Aristotle with
Trendelenburg in Berlin, and read Comte as well as the British
Empiricists (mainly John Stuart Mill), all of whom had a great
influence on his work. Brentano received his Ph.D. from the University
of Tubingen in 1862, with his thesis *On the Several Senses of
Being in Aristotle*.



After graduation Brentano prepared to take his vows; he was ordained a
Catholic priest in 1864. Nevertheless he continued his academic career
at the University of Wurzburg, where he presented his
*Habilitationsschrift* on *The Psychology of Aristotle*
in 1867. Despite reservations in the faculty about his priesthood he
eventually became full professor in 1873. During this period, however,
Brentano struggled more and more with the official doctrine of the
Catholic Church, especially with the dogma of papal infallibility,
promulgated at the first Vatican Council in 1870. Shortly after his
promotion at the University of Wurzburg, Brentano withdrew from
the priesthood and from his position as professor.



After his *Habilitation*, Brentano had started to work on a
large scale work on the foundations of psychology, which he entitled
*Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint*. The first volume was
published in 1874, a second volume (*The Classification of Mental
Phenomena*) followed in 1911, and fragments of the third volume
(*Sensory and Noetic Consciousness*) were published
posthumously by Oskar Kraus in 1928.



Shortly after the publication of the first volume, Brentano took a job
as a full professor at the University of Vienna, where he continued a
successful teaching career. During his tenure in Vienna, Brentano, who
was very critical towards his own writing, did not pursue his plans to
complete and publish the second and third volumes of his
*Psychology*, but preferred to publish shorter texts, most of
which were based on manuscripts for public lectures. The topics range
from aesthetics (*Das Genie* [The Genius], *Das Schlechte
als Gegenstand dichterischer Darstellung* [Evil as Object of
Poetic Representation]) and issues in historiography to *The Origin
of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong*, in which Brentano laid out
his views on ethics. The latter was Brentano's first book to be
translated into English in 1902. 



When in 1880 Brentano and Ida von Lieben decided to wed, they had to
confront the fact that the prevailing law in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire denied matrimony to persons who had been ordained priests
- even if they later had resigned from priesthood. They
surmounted this obstacle by temporarily moving to and becoming
citizens of Saxony, where they finally got married. This was possible
only by temporarily giving up the Austrian citizenship and, in
consequence, the job as full professor at the University. When
Brentano came back to Vienna a few months later, the Austrian
authorities did not reassign him his position. Brentano became
*Privatdozent*, a status that allowed him to go on teaching
- but did not entitle him to receive a salary or to supervise
theses. For several years he tried in vain to get his position back.
In 1895, after the death of his wife, he left Austria disappointed; at
this occasion, he published a series of three articles in the Viennese
newspaper *Die neue freie Presse* entitled *Meine letzen
Wunsche fur Osterreich* [My Last Wishes for
Austria] (which soon afterwards appeared as a self-standing book), in
which he outlined his philosophical position as well as his approach
to psychology, but also harshly criticized the legal situation of
former priests in Austria. In 1896 he settled down in Florence where
he got married to Emilie Ruprecht in 1897.



Brentano has often been described as an extraordinarily charismatic
teacher. Throughout his life he influenced a great number of students,
many of who became important philosophers and psychologists in their
own rights, such as Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, Christian von
Ehrenfels, Anton Marty, Carl Stumpf, Kasimir Twardowski, as well as
Sigmund Freud. Many of his students became professors in different
parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Marty and Ehrenfels in Prague,
Meinong in Graz, and Twardowski in Lvov (now Lviv), and so spread
Brentanianism over the whole Austro-Hungarian Empire, which explains
the central role of Brentano in the philosophical development in
central Europe, especially in what was later called the Austrian
Tradition in philosophy.



Brentano always emphasized that he meant to teach his students to
think critically and in a scientific manner, without holding
prejudices and paying undue respect to philosophical schools or
traditions. When former students of his took a critical approach to
his own work, however, when they criticized some of his doctrines and
modified others to adapt them for their own goals, Brentano reacted
bitterly. He often refused to discuss criticism, ignored improvements,
and thus became more and more isolated, a development that was
reinforced by his increasing blindness.



Due to these eye-problems Brentano could not read or write any longer,
but had his wife read to him and dictated his work to her.
Nonetheless, he produced a number of books in his years in Florence.
In 1907 he published *Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie*, a
collection of shorter texts on psychology. In 1911 he presented not
only the second volume of his *Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint*, but also two books on Aristotle: in *Aristotle and
his World View* he provides an outline and interpretation of
Aristotle's philosophy. In *Aristoteles Lehre vom Ursprung
des menschlichen Geistes* Brentano continues a debate with Zeller.
This debate had started already in the 1860s, when Brentano criticized
Zeller's interpretation of Aristotle in his *Psychology of
Aristotle* and became quite intense and aggressive in the
seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century.



When Italy entered war against Germany and Austria during World War I,
Brentano, who felt himself a citizen of all three countries, moved
from Florence to neutral Switzerland. He passed away in Zurich on
March 17, 1917.



Brentano left a huge number of unpublished manuscripts, including
poetry and letters on a wide range of philosophical topics in his last
domicile in Zurich and in his summer-residence in
Schonbuhel bei Melk; some manuscripts were probably left
behind in Florence. After his death, Alfred Kastil and Oskar Kraus, who
were students of Brentano's former student Anton Marty in
Prague, worked on the *Nachlass*, transferring a good part of it
to Innsbruck. Their attempt to set up a Brentano-archive was supported
by Tomas Masaryk, a former student of Brentano who had become founder
and first President (from 1918 to 1935) of the Republic of
Czechoslovakia. As a result, in 1932 many of the original manuscripts
were moved to Prague where an archive was founded. Alas, due to the
political turbulences that were to came over central Europe the
project made it necessary to transfer the archive again. Substantial
parts of the *Nachlass* were transferred to different places in
the United States, some of it has later been brought back to Europe,
especially to the Brentano-Forschungsstelle at the University of Graz,
Austria, and the Brentano family archive in Blonay, Switzerland. (For
a detailed history of Brentano's *Nachlass*, cf. Binder
(2013)). 



Kastil and Kraus did succeed, however, to begin to publish
posthumously some of the lecture notes, letters, and drafts he had
left. They tried to present Brentano's work as best as they
could, putting together various texts to what they thought were
rounded, convincing works, sometimes following questionable editorial
criteria. Their work was continued by other, more careful editors, but
has by far not yet been completed: a much needed critical edition of
his complete oeuvre is still to be waited for.


## 2. Philosophy as a Rigorous Science and the Rise of Scientific Psychology



A central principle of Brentano's philosophy, which should
become widely accepted among Brentano's students, was that
philosophy should be done in a rigorous, scientific manner. Already
early in his career, in the public defense of his
*Habilitation* in 1866, he stated 25 theses, the fourth of
which reads: "The true method of philosophy is that of natural
science." (contained in: *ZP*, 136, my translation)
["*Verae philosophiae methodus nihil alia est nisi scientiae
naturarum*"]. Brentano, thus, opposed the idea that there
was a unique method for philosophy and denied that there was a
"first philosophy" that could unveil genuinely
philosophical truths and thus play a privileged or foundational role
in the overall system of the sciences. According to Brentano,
philosophy--and in particular philosophical
psychology--should apply a method that is based on observation,
description of facts, and induction; just like the (other) natural
sciences.



It has been suggested that Brentano's fourth
*Habilitations*-thesis makes him an advocate of a particular
version of the unity of the sciences, according to which there is a
unity of method (cf. Haller 1993, 27) and that it stands in contrast
to "Dilthey's view according to which the so-called
*Geisteswissenschaften* or human or moral sciences would
somehow call for a special method of 'understanding' or
*Verstehen*, as opposed to the 'explanation' of the
natural sciences." (Smith 1994, 31). One has to be cautious not
to overstate this point, though. While it is true that Brentano uses
both the terms "method" [*methodus*] and
"natural science" [*scientiae naturarum*] in the
singular, there is strong evidence that he had a minimal understanding
of what this method should exactly consist in. He never suggested that
all scientific disciplines could be reduced to other, more basic
disciplines, nor did he argue that all natural sciences should apply
exactly the same method, nor that mathematization or the use of a
formal language was indispensable for scientificity. For Brentano, a
method counts as scientific as long as it fulfills the minimal
requirements of applying observation, description of facts, and
induction. The specific methodological procedures applied in a given
scientific discipline depend first and foremost on the objects
studied:



> 
> "Natural science, thus, requires in no way [...] that we should
> proceed everywhere in the same manner and in the way we do in the
> simplest cases of mechanics. On the contrary, it teaches and instructs
> us to change our procedure [*Verfahren*] in accordance with the
> particular nature of the objects" (*ZP*, 35, my
> translation).
>   
> 
> ["*Die Naturwissenschaft verlangt also keineswegs, [...]
> dass wir uberall gleichmassig und so, wie in den
> einfachsten Fallen der Mechanik vorgehen sollen. Im Gegenteil,
> sie unterweist uns und ubt uns darauf ein, der besonderen Natur
> der Gegenstande entsprechend unser Verfahren zu
> andern*"]
> 



Regarding formal methods he states: "Mathematical analysis,
which is the main means of scientific progress in some areas of
natural science, does not play nearly any role at all in
others." (*ZK* 35, my translation) ["*Die
mathematische Analyse, die auf manchem Gebiet der Naturwissenschaft
das hauptsachliche Mittel des Fortschritt ist, spielt darum
bekanntlich auf anderen so gut wie gar keine Rolle.*"]
Brentano has never made an attempt to introduce formal or mathematical
methods in philosophy or psychology. On the contrary, he criticized
Johann Friedrich Herbart's attempts to mathematize psychology,
pointing out that Herbart's mathematical deductions lack
empirical foundation and therefore lose contact to the actual
phenomena (cf. *LW*, 36). In another place where he discusses
Herbart's position, he states: "Alas, many believed that
where there is so much mathematical rigour, there must be exact
science" (*GA*, 53f, my translation). ["*Leider
meinten viele, wo so viel mathematische Strenge zu finden sei,
musse exakte Wissenschaft gegeben sein*."] For
Brentano, any rigorous, scientific method had to be appropriate for
the observed phenomena; his position, thus, is closer to classical
empiricism and positivism than to the logical positivism as it was
developed in Vienna a decade after his death.



Brentano's views concerning the right method in philosophy was
of particular importance to his contributions to psychology, as
already the title of his main work, *Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint* suggests. Also there he argued that the right
procedure consisted in observing and describing the relevant phenomena
and establishing the general laws on the basis of induction. The
particularity of Brentano's method lies in the fact that
psychology is based mainly on observation that is performed from a
first person point of view. The psychologist draws on the intimate
knowledge concerning her own current mental phenomena that she gains
through inner perception (which, as we shall see below, is to be
distinguished from inner observation). Brentano does not suggest,
however, that these descriptions are infallible: as it is impossible
to live and describe a particular experience at the same time, all
descriptions of mental phenomena have to rely on memory and inner
observation.



> 
> "If the attempt to observe the anger which stirs us becomes
> impossible because the phenomenon disappears, it is clear that an
> earlier state of excitement can no longer be interfered in this way.
> And we really can focus our attention on a past mental phenomenon just
> as we can upon a present physical phenomenon, and in this way we can,
> so to speak, observe it." (*PES*, 26).
>   
> 
> ["Wenn der Versuch, den Zorn, der uns bewegt, beobachtend zu
> verfolgen, durch Aufhebung des Phanomens unmoglich wird, so
> kann dagegen ein Zustand fruherer Aufregung offenbar keine
> Storung mehr erleiden. Auch gelingt es wirklich, dem vergangenen
> psychischen Phanomen so wie einem gegenwartigen physischen
> mit Aufmerksamkeit sich zuzuwenden, und es in dieser Weise sozusagen
> beobachten." (*PES*, 49)]
> 



Moreover, as inner perception and memory as sources of experience are
limited to one's own mental life, they have to be complemented
with the "*indirect knowledge of the mental phenomena of
others*" ["indirekte Erkenntnis fremder psychischer
Phanomene"], which we can gain on the basis of the manifest
behavior we can observe in others, including their verbal behavior,
i.e., when "a person describes them directly in words."
(*PES* 28) ["*jemand geradezu in Worten sie
beschreibt*"] (*PES* 53). 



Brentano's approach, like that of other introspectionist
psychologists of the late nineteenth century, was harshly criticized
with the rise of scientific psychology in the tradition of logical
positivism, especially by behaviorists, who argue that empirical
psychology must not make use of introspection, but only of data that
can be obtained by the observation of the manifest behaviour of human
beings from a third-person point of view. This should not obscure the
fact that Brentano did play a crucial role in the process of
psychology becoming an independent science. He distinguished between
*genetic* and empirical or, as he called it,
*descriptive* psychology, a distinction that is most explicitly
drawn in lecture notes form the mid-1880s that have been published in
*Descriptive Psychology* (*DP*). Genetic psychology
studies psychological phenomena from a third-person point of view. It
involves the use of experiments and thus satisfies the scientific
standards we nowadays expect of an empirical science. Even though
Brentano never conducted psychological experiments in laboratories, he
very actively supported the installation of the first laboratories for
experimental psychology in the Austro-Hungarian Empire - a goal
that was achieved by his student Alexius Meinong in Graz. Descriptive
psychology (to which Brentano sometimes also referred
as "phenomenology" (cf. *DP* 137)) aims at
describing consciousness from a first-person point of view. Its goal
is to list "fully the basic components out of which everything
internally perceived by humans is composed, and ... [to
enumerate] the ways in which these components can be connected"
(*DP* 4). Brentano's distinction between genetic and
descriptive psychology strongly influenced Husserl's development
of the phenomenological method, especially in its early phases. But
already then Brentano could not approve of Husserl's development
for it involved the intuition of abstract essences, the existence of
which Brentano denied. With his so-called "transcendental
turn" in the mid of the first decade of the twentieth century,
Husserl alienated himself more and more from the Brentanian roots of
the phenomenological method.


## 3. Brentano's Theory of Mind



Brentano's main goal was to lay the basis for a scientific
psychology, which he defines as "the science of mental
phenomena" (*PES*, 14) ["*Wissenschaft von den
psychischen Erscheinungen*"]. In order to give flesh to this
definition of the discipline, he provides a more detailed
characterization of mental phenomena. He proposes six criteria to
distinguish mental from physical phenomena (*PES* 61-77),
the most important of which are: (*i*) mental phenomena are the
exclusive object of inner perception, (*ii*) they always appear
as a unity, and (*iii*) they are always intentionally directed
towards an object. (The other three criteria are: psychological
phenomena - and only those - are presentations or
phenomena based upon presentations; they seem to have no spatial
extension; and have not only intentional, but also actual existence.)
I will discuss the first two criteria in the next sub-section, and the
third in a separate sub-section below. 


### 3.1 Inner Perception, Unity of Consciousness and the Tripartition of Mental Phenomena



All mental phenomena have in common, Brentano argues, "that they
are only perceived in inner consciousness, while in the case of
physical phenomena only external perception is possible"
(*PES*, 70) ["*dass sie nur in innerem
Bewusstsein wahrgenommen werden, wahrend bei den physischen
nur aussere Wahrnehmung moglich ist.*"
(*PES* 128)]. According to Brentano, the former of these two
forms of perception provides an unmistakable evidence for what is
true. Since the German word for perception (*Wahrnehmung*),
literally translated, means "taking-true", Brentano says
that it is the only kind of perception in a strict sense. He points
out that inner perception must not be mixed up with inner observation,
which would require that one is having a mental act, the act of
observing, that is directed towards another mental act, the act
observed. Inner perception, on the other hand, must not be conceived
as a full-fledged act that accompanies another mental act towards
which it is directed. It is rather interwoven with the latter: in
addition to being primarily directed towards an object, every mental
act is *incidentally* directed towards itself as a secondary
object. When I see a tree, for example, the primary object of my
visual experience is the tree. But I am also aware that I am
*seeing* and not, say, hearing or touching the tree; I am, in
other words, aware of the fact that I have a mental phenomenon that is
directed towards the tree. This is possible because one and the same
mental phenomenon, my visual experience, is directed not only towards
its primary object, the tree, it is *incidentally* directed
also towards itself as a secondary object. 



> 
> "The presentation of the sound and the presentation of the
> presentation of the sound form one single mental phenomenon; it is
> only by considering it in its relation to two different objects, one
> of which is a physical phenomenon and the other a mental phenomenon,
> that we divide it conceptually into two presentations. In the same
> mental phenomenon in which the sound is present to our minds we
> simultaneously apprehend the mental phenomenon itself. What is more,
> we apprehend it in accordance with its dual nature insofar as it has
> the sound as content within it, and insofar as it has itself as
> content at the same time." (*PES*, 98)
>   
> 
> ["*Die Vorstellung des Tones und die Vorstellung von der
> Vorstellung des Tones bilden nicht mehr als ein einziges psychisches
> Phanomen, das wir nur, indem wir es in seiner Beziehung auf zwei
> verschiedene Objekte, deren eines ein physisches, und deren anderes
> ein psychisches Phanomen ist, betrachten, begrifflich in zwei
> Vorstellungen zergliederten. In demselben psychischen Phanomen,
> in welchem der Ton vorgestellt wird, erfassen wir zugleich das
> psychische Phanomen selbst, und zwar nach seiner doppelten
> Eigentumlichkeit, insofern es als Inhalt den Ton in sich hat, und
> insofern es zugleich sich selbst als Inhalt gegenwartig
> ist."* (*PES*, 179)]
> 



According to Brentano, *every* mental phenomenon is directed
towards itself as a secondary object; inner perception is, thus, a
form of mechanism on the basis of which we become aware of our own
mental phenomena.



As a consequence, Brentano denies the idea that there could be
unconscious mental acts: since *every* mental act is
incidentally directed towards itself as a secondary object, we are
automatically aware of every occurring mental act. He admits, however,
that we can have mental acts of various degrees of intensity. In
addition, he holds that the degree of intensity with which the object
is presented is equal to the degree of intensity in which the
secondary object, i.e., the act itself, is presented. Consequently, if
we have a mental act of a very low intensity, our inner perception of
the act or, as he puts it, our secondary consciousness of it will also
have a very low intensity. From this Brentano concludes that sometimes
we are inclined to say that we had an unconscious mental phenomenon
when actually we had a conscious mental phenomenon of very low
intensity.



Consciousness, Brentano argues, always forms a unity. While we can
perceive a number of physical phenomena at one and the same time, we
can only perceive one mental phenomenon at a specific point in time.
When we seem to have more than one mental act at a time, like when we
are listening to a melody while tasting a sip of red wine and enjoying
the beautiful view from the window, all these mental phenomena melt
into one, they become moments or, to stick with Brentano's
terminology, divisives of a collective. If one of the divisives ends
in the course of time, e.g., when I swallow the wine and turn my eyes
to the fireplace, but continue to listen to the music, the collective
goes on to exist. Brentano's views on the unity of consciousness
entail that inner observation, as explained above, is strictly
impossible, for this would require us to have two distinct acts in the
very same moment. Of course it is possible to *remember*
another mental act one had a moment ago, or expect future mental acts,
but due to the unity of consciousness one cannot have two distinct
mental acts, one of which being directed towards the other, at the
same time.



The fact that we can be directed towards one and the same object in
different ways allows Brentano to introduce a classification of mental
phenomena. He distinguishes three basic kinds: presentations,
judgments, and emotions (which he refers to as "phenomena of
love and hate"). These are not three completely distinct
classes, though. Presentations are the most basic kind of acts; we
have a presentation each time when we are directed towards an object,
be it that we are imagining, seeing, remembering, or expecting it,
etc. In his *Psychology* Brentano held that two presentations
can differ only in the object, towards which they are directed. Later
he modified his position, though, and argued that they can also differ
in various modes, such as temporal modes (cf. *PES* 217 [This
text is part of the appendix to the second part of *PES* from
1911 - for the German original cf. PES, vol II, 142]). The two
other categories, judgments and phenomena of love and hate, are based
on presentations. In a judgment we accept or deny the existence of the
presented object. A judgment, thus, is a presentation plus a
qualitative mode of acceptance or denial. The third category, which
Brentano names "phenomena of love and hate,"
comprises emotions, feelings, desires and acts of will. In these acts
we have positive or negative feelings or attitudes towards an object.




Brentano's tripartition of mental phenomena is a basic element
of his theory that remained central for his whole life. The fact that
he saw himself constrained to make minor adjustments shows that
Brentano did approach philosophy in a very systematic manner and
always had the bigger picture in mind. It can, thus, be taken as
evidence that "in his mind Brentano was continuously refining
and chiseling away at a unified system, a system that harmonized and
stabilized the bits and pieces in his messy literary state"
(Kriegel 2017a, 29). 



Moreover, his conception of secondary consciousness, in combination
with this thesis of the unity of consciousness have had a strong echo
in the philosophy of mind, in particular in the recent debate
concerning the nature of consciousness. It has been suggested that
Brentano's notion of secondary consciousness (i.e., the thesis
that every mental phenomenon is incidentally directed also towards
itself as a secondary object) can provide the means to overcome
higher-order theories of consciousness that have been widely discussed
in the late twentieth century. In this debate, the exact reading of
Brentano's thesis was often at stake. Some philosophers have
suggested that Brentano's view, according to which every mental
phenomenon is object of inner perception, was an early expression of a
higher-order perception theory of consciousness (cf., for example,
Guzeldere 1997, 789). This interpretation, however, does not pay
due attention to the fact that according to Brentano, inner perception
is not a self-standing mental phenomenon of a higher level, but rather
a structural moment of *every* mental phenomenon. Moreover,
with his unity of consciousness thesis Brentano explicitly rejects the
basic assumption of all higher-order perception theories of
consciousness, i.e., the idea that we can have two mental phenomena
(of distinct levels) at the same time, one of them being directed
towards the other: higher-order perception theories postulate what
Brentano calls 'inner observation' (as opposed to inner
perception), which according to him was impossible, as we have seen
above. 



Accordingly, a number of recent interpreters have suggested that
Brentano was an advocate of a one-level account of consciousness:
"Since the features that make an act conscious are firmly
located within the act itself rather than bestowed on it by a second
act, this locates Brentano's view as a one-level view of
consciousness" (Thomasson, 2000, 192). This reading has given
place to neo-Brentanian theories such as Thomasson's adverbial
account (cf. Thomasson 2000) or self-representational approaches (cf.,
for example, Kriegel 2003a, b) that build on the thesis that
"every conscious state has a dual representational content. Its
main content is the normal content commonly attributed to mental
representations. But it also has a (rather peripheral) special
content, namely, its own occurrence" (Kriegel 2003a, 480), which
they take as Brentano's central thesis. Moreover, Kriegel
suggests that for Brentano this self-representational aspect is a
necessary condition for having a presentation (Kriegel 2013). 



Other interprets have taken more cautious lines. Mark Textor (2006),
for example, has stressed the ties between Brentano's notion of
secondary consciousness and his thesis of the unity of consciousness.
A mental phenomenon, according to Textor's interpretation of
Brentano's theory, does not become conscious by representing
itself, but rather by its being *unified* or fused with an
immediately evident cognition of it. Dan Zahavi, on the other hand,
has insisted that Brentano does distinguish two levels of perception,
which sheds doubts on the one-level interpretation: "It could be
argued that Brentano's claim that every conscious intentional
state takes two objects, a primary (external) object and secondary
(internal) object, remains committed to a higher-order account of
consciousness; it simply postulates it as being implicitly contained
in every conscious state" (Zahavi, 2006, 5). In short,
Brentano's distinction between primary and secondary
consciousness "introduces some kind of level-distinction into
the structure of experience" (Brandl 2013, 61) but does not
conceive of higher-perception as a full-fledged mental phenomenon at
its own, which is why Brandl has recently proposed to regard it a
'one-and-a-half-level theory' (Brandl 2013, 61f).



While the debate concerning the exact interpretation of his views
concerning secondary consciousness is still open, it underlines the
relevance of Brentano's contributions to contemporary philosophy
of mind. 


### 3.2 Intentionality



Brentano is probably best known for having introduced the notion of
intentionality to contemporary philosophy. He first characterizes this
notion with the following words, which have become the classical,
albeit not completely unambiguous formulation of the intentionality
thesis: 



> 
> 
> "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 toward 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..." (Brentano *PES*, 68)
>   
> 
> ["*Jedes psychische Phanomen ist durch das
> charakterisiert, was die Scholastiker des Mittelalters die
> intentionale (auch wohl mentale) Inexistenz eines Gegenstandes genannt
> haben, und was wir, obwohl mit nicht ganz unzweideutigen
> Ausdrucken, die Beziehung auf einen Inhalt, die Richtung auf ein
> Objekt (worunter hier nicht eine Realitat zu verstehen ist), oder
> die immanente Gegenstandlichkeit nennen wurden. Jedes
> enthalt etwas als Objekt in sich...*" (Brentano,
> *PES* 124f)]
> 
> 
> 



This quotation must be understood in context: in this passage,
Brentano aims at providing one (of six) criteria to distinguish mental
from physical phenomena with the aim to define the subject matter of
scientific psychology - and not to develop a systematic account
of intentionality. The passage clearly suggests, however, that the
intentional object towards which we are directed is part of the
psychological act. It is something mental rather than physical.
Brentano, thus, seems to advocate a form of immanentism, according to
which the intentional object is "in the head," as it were.
Some Brentano scholars have recently argued that this immanent reading
of the intentionality thesis is too strong. In the light of other
texts by Brentano from the same period they argue that he
distinguishes between intentional correlate and object, and that the
existence of the latter does not depend on our being directed towards
it.



When Brentano's students took up his notion of
intentionality to develop more systematic accounts, they often
criticized it for its unclarity regarding the ontological status of
the intentional object: if the intentional object is part of the act,
it was argued, we are faced with a duplication of the object. Next to
the real, physical object, which is perceived, remembered, thought of,
etc., we have a mental, intentional object, towards which the act is
actually directed. Thus, when I think about the city of Paris, I am
actually thinking of a mental object that is part of my act of
thinking, and not about the actual city. This view leads to obvious
difficulties, the most disastrous of which is that two persons can
never be directed towards one and the same object.



If we try to resolve the problem by taking the intentional object to
be identical with the real object, on the other hand, we face the
difficulty of explaining how we can have mental phenomena that are
directed towards non-existing objects such as Hamlet, the golden
mountain, or a round square. Like my thinking about the city of Paris,
all these acts are intentionally directed towards an object, with the
difference, however, that their objects do not really exist.



Brentano's initial formulation of the intentionality-thesis does
not address these problems concerning the ontological status of the
intentional object. The first attempt of Brentano's students to
overcome these difficulties was made by Twardowski, who distinguished
between content and object of the act, the former of which is immanent
to the act, the latter not (cf. Twardowski 1977). This distinction
strongly influenced other members of the Brentano School, mainly the
two students for who the notion of intentionality had the most central
place, Meinong and Husserl.



Meinong's theory of objects can best be understood as a reaction
to the ontological difficulties in Brentano's account. Rather
than accepting the notion of an immanent content, Meinong argues that
the intentional relation is always a relation between the mental act
and an object. In some cases the intentional object does not exist,
but even in these cases there is an object external to the mental act
towards which we are directed. According to Meinong, even non-existent
objects are in some sense real. Since we can be intentionally directed
towards them, they must subsist (*bestehen*). Not all
subsisting objects exist; some of them cannot even exist for they are
logically impossible, such as round squares (cf. Meinong 1981). The
notion of intentionality played a central role also in Husserlian
phenomenology. Applying his method of the phenomenological reduction,
however, Husserl addresses the problem of directedness with his notion
of 'noema' as intentional correlate of the act (for a more
detailed discussion, cf. the entry on
 Husserl).
 



Brentano was not very fond of his students' attempts to resolve
these difficulties, mainly because he rejected their underlying
ontological assumptions. He was quick to point out that he never
intended the intentional object to be immanent to the act. Brentano
thought that this interpretation of his position was obviously absurd,
for it would be "paradoxical to the extreme to say that a man
promises to marry an *ens rationis* and fulfills his promise by
marrying a real person" (*PES*, 299). In later texts, he
therefore suggested to see intentionality as an exceptional form of
relation. A mental act does not stand in an ordinary relation to an
object, but in a quasi-relation (*Relativliches*). For a
relation to exist, both relata have to exist. A person *a* is
taller than another person *b*, for example, only if both
*a* and *b* exist (and *a* is, in fact, taller
than *b*). This does not hold for the intentional
quasi-relation, Brentano suggests. A mental phenomenon can stand in a
quasi-relation to an object independently of whether it exists or not.
Mental acts, thus, can stand in a quasi-relation to existing objects
like the city of Paris as well as non-existing objects like the Golden
Mountain. Brentano's later account, which is closely related to
his later metaphysics, especially to his turn towards reism, i.e., the
view that only individual objects exist, can hardly be considered a
solution of the problem of the ontological status of the intentional
object. He rather introduces a new term to reformulate the
difficulties.


### 3.3 Time-Consciousness



According to Brentano's thesis of the unity of consciousness, we
can have only one mental phenomenon at a time. Next to this synchronic
unity, however, there is also a diachronic unity of consciousness: my
present mental phenomenon and the one I had just a moment or a few
minutes ago form a unity as well. This becomes particularly evident
when we consider cases in which we are intentionally directed towards
temporally extended objects such as melodies, movies, or goals in a
soccer game.



Brentano regards time as a continuum of which only one point, the
present moment, is real. As a consequence, mental phenomena do not
have temporal extension (very much like like mathematical points on a
line). The question, now, is: how can mental phenomena, which do not
have any temporal extension, be directed towards objects that are
extended in time? Can we be directed towards the melody, or only
towards a (very small) temporal part of it? Brentano solves this
problem by arguing that the object of a presentation does not vanish
immediately from consciousness in the moment the presentation is over,
it is rather retained in consciousness for a short while. In order to
explain this process, he introduces the notion of "original
association" or "proteraesthesis", which, as de
Warren suggests, "occupies a notable place in the list of
Brentano's conceptual innovations; in contrast to other
distinguishing concepts of descriptive psychology ... it is without
precedence in the history of philosophy" (De Warren 2009,
57f).



Brentano has reflected on time consciousness throughout his life, but
has never given a systematic exposition of his position that would
give it a static form. Rather, he has changed his position several
times, often to accommodate it to changes in his overall views. Based
on the testimonies of his students and manuscripts contained in the
*Nachlass*, we can distinguish different phases of
Brentano's views on time-consciousness (cf. Frechette
2017).



According to his *early view*, time consciousness depends on
the mode of judgment. I can be intentionally directed towards a past
object if I judge (correctly) that, say, "Caesar was stabbed on
the Ides of March, 44 B.C.". The reason for characterising
temporal differences as modes of judgments is probably the fact that
in language we express these temporal differences with the tense of
the verb (past, present, future) - but the verb also serves to
express our accepting or denying the existence of an object in a
judgment.



In his *second phase*, which he held from the early 1870s to
the early 1890s, Brentano introduced the notion of original
association. A mental phenomenon does not disappear from consciousness
from one moment to another, it is rather retained for a short period
of time. When I hear a melody *a*, *b*, *c*,
*d*, for example, I first hear *a*. When, in a second
moment, I hear *b*, *a* still persists in my
consciousness, but is modified as "past". When, another
moment later, I hear *c*, both *b* and *a* are
retained in original association; now also *b* is given as
"past", while *a* is "pushed back" even
further into the past, as it were, etc. In this way, Brentano can
explain how the melody (as a whole) can be the intentional object of a
mental phenomenon: in each moment, the present and the (very) recent
tones are given, but the latter are not given in the same way (or else
we would not hear a melody, but we would hear all the tones at once;
we would, in other words, not hear a melody, but a cacophony). The
tones that are past are given with temporal modifications -
which do not further determine them, but rather modify their
ontological status from real to not real. In this period Brentano
holds that two presentations can differ only in the object towards
which they are directed; the continuously changing temporal moment,
thus, is a modification of the objects. An object that sinks back into
the past undergoes, according to this view, continuous
modifications.



In the early 1890s Brentano modifies his views again, suggesting that
the temporal modification is not a modification of the content, but of
the attitude of acknowledgement in judgments. With this change,
Brentano avoids problems of his earlier view: he no longer needs to
suggest that temporal modifications are parts of the intentional
objects that are given in original associations, nor does he need to
explain how the real, present object can form a continuum with the
past objects that are not real.



In later years, Brentano makes further changes to his theory of
time-consciousness. Since temporal modifications can be observed also
in mental phenomena that do not contain a judgment (for example when
one imagines vividly hearing a melody), he gives up his view that two
presentations can differ only in their intentional object and allows
for modes of presentation - such as temporal modes. Finally, in
a late manuscript that was dictated in 1915, Brentano introduces
another minor modification of his theory, suggesting that past objects
can be presented only in *modo obliquo*, while present objects
are presented in *modo recto*.



Brentano's reflections on time-consciousness illustrate very
well his way of doing philosophy, but also the way in which his views
have had an influence on others. As Oskar Kraus notes in his
*Recollections* (cf. Kraus 1919, 39), Brentano has vividly
engaged with the problem of time and the origins of time consciousness
throughout his life. He presented it several times to students in
class and discussed i in letters with colleagues at different moments
in time. He never presented a systematic exposition of his views in
publication, though. As a result, Brentano's views on the topic
were very dynamic, as he did not hesitate to revise them when he
encountered problems or when changes in other parts of his overall
theory made it necessary. As he never published a systematic statement
of his views on time-consciousness, interested scholars could learn
about it only from the expositions of Brentano's students like
Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, and in particular Edmund Husserl who,
however, used Brentano's views as departing point for their own
reflections, very often in an attempt to overcome the difficulties
inherent to the version of Brentano's theory they were
acquainted with. Brentano's own views were, thus, very
influential, but risked to become eclipsed by the contributions of his
students, who further developed them. 


## 4. Logic, Ethics, and Aesthetics



According to Brentano, psychology plays a central role in the
sciences; he considers especially logics, ethics, and aesthetics as
practical disciplines that depend on psychology as their theoretical
foundation. He collocates these three disciplines in his larger
systematic outlook by tying them to the three kinds of mental
phenomenon: presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate,
i.e., emotions. The "triad of the *Beautiful*, the
*True*, and the *Good* ... [is] related to the three
aspects of our mental life" (*PES*, 203). Moreover, the
three disciplines essentially build on his views that presentations
are intrinsically valuable and that not only judgments, but also
emotions can be correct or not correct. 



Logic, according to Brentano, is the practical discipline that is
concerned with judgments; i.e. with the class of mental phenomena in
which we take a positive or a negative stance towards the (existence
of the) object by affirming or denying it. In addition, judgments are
correct or not; they have a truth-value. According to Brentano, a
judgment is true when it is evident, i.e., when one perceives (in
inner perception that is directed towards the judgment) that one
judges with evidence. Brentano, thus, rejects the correspondence
theory of truth, suggesting that "a person judges truly, if and
only if, his judgment agrees with the judgment he would make if we
were to judge with evidence" (Chisholm 1986, 38).
Notwithstanding this dependence on the notion of judgment, however,
truth, for Brentano, is not a subjective notion: if one person affirms
an object and another person denies the same object, only one of them
judges correctly. (For a more detailed discussion of Brentano's
contributions to logic, cf. the entry
 Brentano's Theory of Judgement.)



Ethics, on the other hand, is concerned with emotions or, as Brentano
calls them, phenomena of love and hate. Brentano sees a structural
analogy between judgments and phenomena of this class: just like
judgments, that are either affirmative or negative, also emotions
consist in taking a positive or a negative (emotional) attitude
towards an object: love or hate, inclination and disinclination, being
pleased and being displeased, etc. Moreover, just as (positive and
negative) judgments can be correct or incorrect, Brentano holds that
also (both positive and negative) emotions can be correct or
incorrect. An emotion is correct, according to Brentano, "when
one's feelings are adequate to their object -- adequate in
the sense of being appropriate, suitable, or fitting"
(*ORW*, 70). [*"Wer richtig liebt und hasst,
dessen Gemut verhalt sich den Gegenstanden
adaquat, d.h. es verhalt sich konvenient, passend,
entsprechend"* (*USE*, 76)] 



If it is correct to love an object, we can say that it is good; if it
is correct to hate it, it is bad:



> 
> "We call a thing *true* when the affirmation relating to
> it is correct. We call a thing *good* when the love relating to
> it is correct. In the broadest sense of the term, the good is that
> which is worthy of love, that which can be loved with a love that is
> correct." (*ORW*, 18)
>   
> 
> ["*Wir nennen etwas Wahr, wenn die darauf bezugliche
> Anerkennung richtig ist. Wir nennen etwas gut, wenn die darauf
> bezugliche Liebe richtig ist. Das mit richtiger Liebe zu
> Liebende, das Liebenswerte, ist das Gute im weitesten Sinne des
> Wortes.*" (*USE* 17)]
> 



Not any experience of pleasure is taken into consideration, one needs
some sort of evidence that the pleasure is correct. Brentano
characterizes the relevant form of pleasure with the following words:
"it is a pleasure of the highest form; it is thus the analogue of
something being evident in the sphere of judgment"
(*ORW*, 22) ["*Es ist ein Gefallen von jener
hoheren Form die das Analogon ist von der Evidenz auf dem Gebiet
des Urteils*" (USE 21)]. In this way Brentano avoids a
subjectivist position. While it is true that correct pleasure is an
emotion experienced by subjects, it is impossible that one person can
evidently and correctly love an object and another correctly and
evidently hate it. In some cases, pleasure or love might be misguided
by our prejudices, instincts or habits. 



Brentano presented his reflections on ethics in a lecture in 1889. The
manuscript was published as a short monograph in the same year, an
English translation had appeared as early as 1902 and was, for a long
time, the only text by Brentano available in English. This might
explain why Brentano's views on ethics have received more
attention in English speaking countries than in central Europe. In
particular, Brentano's basic insight that moral and aesthetic
value are related to attitudes we take towards objects and that these
latter attitudes can be correct or incorrect, have had a revival in
recent years, as it has inspired
 fitting attitude theories of value.
 



Aesthetics, finally, is based on the most basic class of mental
phenomena: on presentations. According to Brentano, every presentation
is in itself of value; this holds even for those that become the basis
of a correct, negative judgment or emotion. 



> 
> "Every presentation, taken by itself, is a good and recognizable
> as such, since an emotion that is characterized as being correct can
> be directed towards it. It is out of question that everyone, if they
> had to choose between a state of unconsciousness and the having of any
> presentation whatsoever, would welcome even the poorest presentation
> and would not envy lifeless objects. Every presentation appears of
> value in that it constitutes a valuable enrichment of life."
> (GA, 144 [my translation])
>   
> 
> ["*Jedes Vorstellen ist aber, an und fur sich
> betrachtet, ein Gut und als solches erkennbar, weil sich eine als
> richtig charakterisierte Gemutstatigkeit darauf richten
> kann. Ohne Frage wurde jedermann, wenn er zwischen dem Zustand
> der Bewusstlosigkeit und dem Besitz irgendwelcher Vorstellungen
> zu wahlen hatte, auch die armlichste
> begrussen und die leblosen Dinge nicht beneiden. Jede
> Vorstellung erscheint als eine Bereicherung des Lebens von
> Wert.*" (GA, 144)]
> 



Thus, while judgments and emotions consist in taking either a positive
or a negative stance, the value of a presentation is always positive,
but comes in degrees: some presentations are of higher value than
others. Not every presentations is of particular aesthetic value,
though; in order to be so, it has to become the object of an emotion
in which one correctly takes a positive stance towards it. In short,
according to Brentano, an object is beautiful if a presentation that
is directed at it arouses a correct, positive emotion, i.e., a form of
pleasure; it is ugly, on the other hand, if a presentation that is
directed at it arouses a correct, negative emotion, a form of
displeasure. 



Like secondary qualities, the aesthetic value is not an intrinsic
property of the object but rather depends on the way we experience it.
We tend to attribute beauty to the objects of experience, but strictly
speaking, the experienced objects are neither beautiful nor ugly:



> 
> "When we call a girl beautiful, the term is used in a figurative
> sense. It is similar when we call objects that are outside of us
> green, red, warm, cold, sweet, bitter. All these expressions refer
> initially to what appears, and are then also transferred to that which
> possibly evokes in us this appearance by having an impact on
> us." (*GA* 123 [my translation])
>   
> 
> ["*Wenn wir ein Madchen schon nennen, so wird der
> Name in ubertragenem Sinn gebraucht. Es ist ahnlich, wie
> wenn wir Korper, die ausser uns sind, grun, rot, warm,
> kalt, heiss, biter nennen. Alle diese Ausdrucke bezeichnen
> zunachst das, was erscheint, werden dann auch auf solches
> ubertragen, was unter Umstanden auf uns einwirkend diese
> Erscheinungen hervorruft.*" (*GA* 123)]
> 



Even though Brentano's views on ethics and aesthetics are
somewhat sketchy and not worked out in detail, we can note that his
treatment of the three practical disciplines of logics, ethics, and
aesthetics are unified by a common principle: the idea that judgments
or emotions not only can be positive or negative, they can also be
fitting or appropriate to their object. Moreover, by tying the three
disciplines to his tripartition of mental phenomena (presentations,
judgments, emotions), he also assigns them an exact collocation in his
overall philosophical system. For these reasons, recent commentators
have insisted in the systematicity of Brentano's philosophy,
arguing that he "was the last philosopher to have offered a
system in the sense of a structurally unified account of the true, the
good, and the beautiful." (Kriegel 2017a, 29). Kriegel
acknowledges, however, that "Brentano was not a systematic
writer" (*ibid.*, 21). This shows in the fact that
Brentano saw his task mainly in sketching the basic views on
aesthetics and ethics in lectures, but never presented a longer or
systematic treatise of these topics, which can be explained by his
conviction that science was a collective enterprise and by his
aversion of the cult of the genius that was widespread in his times.
Brentano probably hoped that others would continue to work out the
details within the parameters he had set. We know about his views on
aesthetics and ethics only from lecture notes that have been cut,
revised, and amended by his students, who typically did not bother to
document their substantial editorial changes in the published text.
Moreover, Brentano never presented his philosophical position as a
system, probably because he did not want to be associated with German
system philosophers of the early and mid-nineteenth century. Thus, the
claim that Brentano was a system-philosopher is somewhat questionable,
though he definitely was a systematic thinker in the sense that he
always kept the overall picture in mind when working on a specific
problem. 


## 5. Psychologism and the Historiography of Philosophy



The discussion of Brentano's views on logic, ethics and
aesthetics shows that his philosophy has strong psychologistic
tendencies. Whether or not one is to conclude that he does adopt a
form of psychologism depends on the exact definition of the latter
term: Brentano vehemently rejects the charge of psychologism, which he
takes to stand for a subjectivist and anthropocentric position. At the
same time, however, he explicitly defends the claim that psychology is
the theoretical science on which practical disciplines of logic,
ethics, and aesthetics are based. In *LW* he explicitly notes
that, like all other philosophical disciplines, also aesthetics is
rooted in psychology and continues: "And similarly one could
show for aesthetics and any other philosophical discipline that
separated from psychology it would have to wither like a branch that
is detached from the trunk." (*LW*, 39 [my translation])
["*Und ahnlich liesse sich fur die Aesthetik
und jede andere Disciplin der Philosophie aufs leichteste nachweisen,
dass sie, losgetrennt von der Psychologie, wie ein vom Stamm
losgetrennter Zweig verdorren musste.*"] Hence,
Brentano does adopt the form of psychologism Husserl seems to have had
in mind in the *Prolegomena* to his *Logical
Investigations*, where he defines logical psychologism as a
position according to which:



> 
> 
> ... [T]he essential theoretical foundations of logic lie in
> psychology, in whose field those propositions belong -- as far as
> their theoretical content is concerned -- which give logic its
> characteristic pattern. ... Often people talk as if psychology
> provided the sole, sufficient, theoretical foundation for logical
> psychology (Husserl 2001, 40).
>   
> 
> [*Die wesentlichen theoretischen Fundamente liegen in der
> Psychologie; in deren Gebiet gehoren ihrem theoretischen Gehalt
> nach die Satze, die der Logik ihr charakteristisches Geprage
> geben. ... Ja nicht selten spricht man so, als gabe die
> Psychologie das alleinige und ausreichende theoretische Fundament
> fur die logische Kunstlehre*. (Husserl, 1900, 51)]
> 
> 
> 



Brentano's tendency to offer psychological explanations is shown
also in his approach to the history of philosophy, in particular in
his explanations of the mechanisms that explain the historical
development in this discipline. In his text *The Four Phases of
Philosophy and Its Current State* (1998) he defended the
metaphilosophical thesis that progress in philosophy can be explained
according to principles of cultural psychology. According to Brentano,
philosophical progress takes place in circles. He divides the whole
history of philosophy in three periods (ancient, medieval, and modern
philosophy), each of which can, according to him, be subdivided in
four phases. The first is a creative phase of renewal and ascending
development; the other three are phases of decline, dominated by a
turn towards practical interests, by scepticism, and finally by
mysticism. After the fourth phase, a new period begins with a creative
phase of renewal. 



Brentano has presented his model to a larger audience quite late in
his life, but he had come up with it very early in his career; Carl
Stumpf reports that Brentano first came up with this idea in 1860 and
that he used it in his lectures on the history of philosophy already
in Wurzburg in the mid-sixties (cf. Stumpf 1919, 89f). While both
the historical accuracy of and the principles of cultural psychology
that gave rise to the model can be put in question (cf. Gilson 1976),
it definitely tells the reader much about Brentano's conception
of philosophy and his vivid interest in its history. Brentano's
short text can, thus, best be read as a simplifying narrative that
allows the author to explain his conviction that philosophy ought to
pursue of pure, theoretical interests and to express his fascination
for philosophers like Aristotle, Thomas, or Descartes as well as his
dislike of Plotinus, Nicolas of Cues, Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. 


## 6. Brentano's Metaphysics



Even though Brentano worked on problems in metaphysics and ontology
throughout his life, he hardly published on these topics during his
lifetime. The impact of his views is due to the fact that from his
early lectures at the University of Wurzburg on he discussed them
with his students, both in class and (especially in later years) in
correspondence. 



Even though Brentano's views have underwent considerable changes
over the years, his general attitude can be characterized as sober,
parsimonious, and (in the current use of the term) nominalistic; at no
point did he admit the existence of universals, he rather relied on
mereological principles to account for classical problems in ontology.




Brentano's early metaphysics, which is the result of his
critical reading of Aristotle, is a form of conceptualism. He does
distinguish between substance and accidents, but argues that both are
but fictions *cum fundamentum in re*. With this, he wants to
suggest that they do not have actual existence, but that we can make
judgments about real things that are correct and contain references to
substances and accidents. This view is closely connected to his
epistemic notion of truth, according to which the question of whether
a judgment is true does not depend on its corresponding to reality,
but rather on whether it can be judged with evidence. Brentano
elucidates the relation between a thing and its properties on the
basis of the mereological notions of "logical part" and
"metaphysical part," the former of which account for
abstract, repeatable properties, the latter for the concrete
properties of a thing. Both are not considered to be denizens of
reality in a narrow sense, but rather fictions that have a foundation
in reality. (For a reconstruction and discussion of the details of
Brentano's early ontology, cf. Chrudzimski 2004).



After the introduction of the notion of intentionality in his
*Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint* (1874), Brentano
struggled to account for the ontological status of the intentional
object. When he first introduces the notion, suggesting, as we have
seen above, that "[e]very mental phenomenon includes something
as object within itself" (*PES*, 88), he seems to be
interested primarily in presenting a psychological thesis and does not
seem to be overly worried with its ontological implications; at this
point, the talk of an "immanent object" might have been a
mere *facon de parler*(cf. Chrudzimski and Smith, 2003,
205). Soon Brentano finds himself in the need, however, to address
this question and, as a result, to enrich the domain of objects in his
ontology. He seems to admit that next to concrete things there are
*irrealia*, that is, objects that to not really exist but have
the status of thought-objects or, as he puts it, *entia
rationis*, that do not have an essence and do not stand in causal
relations. Brentano does not systematically elaborate his ontological
position in this period, we rather find a bundle of ideas of which he
did not seem to be fully convinced. This underlines that the
formulation of these views was not made with the intention to make a
contribution to ontology, but rather to reply to concerns that have
emerged from his introduction of the notion of intentionality. 



In his late philosophy, from 1904 on, Brentano rediscovers the virtue
of ontological parsimony and takes up the main insights of his
conceptualist period, developing (and radicalizing) them to a form of
 reism,
 according to which the only items that exist are individual things
(*res*). "While young Brentano tried to ontologically
play down certain ways of speaking, late Brentano tried to eliminate
them from philosophical discourse" (Chrudzimski 2004, 177) [my
translation. "*Der junge Brentano versuchte gewisse
Redeweisen ontologisch zu* bagatellisieren*, der spate
Brentano versuchte sie aus dem philosophischen Diskurs zu
eliminieren"*] . He abandons the notion of
*irrealia*, which he now regards as linguistic fictions, and
continues to deny the existence of universals or abstract entities.
Instead, he conceives both substances and accidents as real things
that are related to one another by a particular mereological relation:
an accident does not only ontologically depend on the substance, it
also contains the substance as a part without, however, containing any
supplementary part. A white table, accordingly, is an accident that
contains the table as a part. If we were to paint it red, the white
table would cease to exist and the red table would come into existence
- the continuity between the two being guaranteed by the table,
which was part of the white table and is now part of the red table.




Brentano's ontology is known to a broader audience only through
posthumously published works that were edited by his late students
Oskar Kraus and Alfred Kastil, who considered his late position most
important and accordingly put less emphasis on Brentano's
earlier phases. Only recently the development of Brentano's
views on ontology has gained more attention, mainly through the work
of scholars who were able to study unpublished manuscripts in the
archives (cf., for example, Chrudzimski 2004). This underlines once
more the need of a critical edition of Brentano's entire
*Nachlass*, which would make it possible for a broader audience
to critically assess the development of Brentano's views in
ontology. 


## 7. The Impact of Brentano's Philosophy


### 7.1 Early Reception: The Brentano School



Brentano's contributions to philosophy were widely discussed
among philosophers and psychologists at the end of the nineteenth and
the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, he had a strong
impact on an impressive number of students who became famous
philosophers on their own right. Often, these philosophers are
referred to as the "School of Franz Brentano," (cf.
Albertazzi e.al. 1996) in order to underline that all of them drew
explicitly (and when not explicitly, then recognizably) on
Brentano's work. All members of the school have become
acquainted with Brentano's philosophy in his lectures or through
conversation or correspondence with him, but they form a quite
heterogeneous group that did not make attempts to jointly develop a
shared position: there was no general acceptance of a specific
unifying doctrine of the "School", nor did its members
make attempts to unite forces and cooperate on specific projects. What
unites the School is a vivid interests in the topics that Brentano
discussed in his lectures, first and foremost in psychology and in the
idea that philosophy should adopt a rigorous, scientific method (cf.
Dewalque 2017a, b). In fact, it was Brentano's methodological
maxim that has raised the interest in most members of the school in
the first place, cf., for example, Stumpf (1919) and Husserl (1919),
both of who suggest that Brentano's conception of philosophy as
a rigorous science had a decisive impact on their decision to pursue a
professional career in philosophy.



Brentano's influence on students has seen different phases that
are loosely connected to the places where he taught. In his early
years in Wurzburg (1866-1873), Brentano became noted mainly
for his attempt to renew philosophy on the basis of a rigorous,
scientific method. His most important students at the time,
 Carl Stumpf
 and
 Anton Marty,
 made a significant academic career in their own right. As Brentano
was not yet appointed professor and could, in consequence, not yet
supervise PhD theses, both completed their PhD with Lotze in
Gottingen. Stumpf then held positions in Prague, Halle, Munich,
and Berlin, where he founded a psychological laboratory and gave
decisive impulses for the development of Gestalt psychology. Anton
Marty became professor at the University of Prague and had a strong
influence with his work on the philosophy of language. Both Stumpf and
Marty developed their own positions and deviated locally from
Brentano's views, but they remained faithful followers who
continued to acknowledge the influence that Brentano has had on
them.



When Brentano took up teaching at the University of Vienna in 1874,
his lectures soon became very popular among students. In the first
years, Thomas Masaryk (who later became the first president of the
Czechoslovakia),
 Alexius Meinong,
 Alois Hofler, and
 Christian von Ehrenfels
 attended Brentano's lectures. In the years after 1880 (when
Brentano had lost his chair and was teaching as *Privatdozent*,
which meant that he could no longer supervise PhD theses) Franz
Hillebrand,
 Edmund Husserl,
 and
 Kazimierz Twardowski
 studied with him. Unlike Stumpf or Marty, Brentano's students
in Vienna encountered a mature professor who had his *opus
maximum* already published. Their relation to Brentano, in
consequence, was less that of a friendship, and more that between a
student and a renowned professor. Soon many of them have felt the urge
to overcome Brentano's influence and define their own,
independent philosophical position - and possibly form a school
in their own right. In particular Meinong and Husserl, who are
probably the most famous representants of Brentano's school,
came to have a rather troublesome relation to their former teacher. It
is not by accident that both used the term "Brentano
School" only to distance themselves from it.



In 1895, when Brentano gave up his position as *Privatdozent*
in Vienna and moved to Florence, he gave up teaching and could no
longer exert a direct influence on students. In this period, the
center of the Brentano school moved to Prague, where Anton Marty held
regular meetings with interested students, among them Oskar Kraus and
Alfred Kastil. These second-generation members of the Brentano school
- who are often called "*Brentanoten*" or
"orthodox Brentanists" - stayed very faithful to
Brentano's philosophy, (in particular to his last, reistic phase
that they knew first-hand). They saw it as their main task to preserve
Brentano's view and to defend them against the developments
introduced by Husserl and the early phenomenologists as well as those
introduced by Meinong and other members of the Graz School,
respectively. After Brentano's death in 1917, they tried to set
up and archive for Brentano's *Nachlass* and publish
texts from it posthumously. While in the first years they achieved
considerable results, not at least due to the help of the Czech
president Jan Masaryk, the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938
forced them into emigration and so brought an end to the Brentano
School.


### 7.2 Recent Reception: Rediscovering Brentano



Brentano's impact in a larger philosophical audience was soon
eclipsed by that of his students who founded philosophical traditions
on their own: Husserl started the
 phenomenological movement,
 Meinong the Graz school, Twardowski the
 Lvov-Warsaw School.
 As a result, in the second half of the twentieth century Brentano was
often *mentioned* as the philosopher who had (re-)introduced
the notion of intentionality, as "grandfather" of the
phenomenological movement, or for his influence on early analytic
philosophy, but his own philosophical views and arguments were hardly
*discussed*. 



There are notable exceptions to this tendency, though. Roderick
Chisholm, for example, made a continuous effort to show
Brentano's significance to contemporary philosophy by adopting
his results in his own contributions to the philosophy of mind, but
also in presentations of various aspects of Brentano's thought
(cf. Chisholm 1966, 1982, and 1986). Moreover, in recent decades the
tradition that is often referred to as "Austrian
philosophy" has gained increasing interest in a broader
philosophical audience, which is due mainly to the work of Rudolf
Haller, Barry Smith, Peter Simons, and Kevin Mulligan, among others.
By showing the systematic relevance of Brentano's (and other
Austrian philosophers') contributions to problems discussed in
ontology, logic, the theory of emotions, or consciousness, they could
counteract the tendency to reduce Brentano's contributions to
the introduction of the notion of intentionality. 



It is quite interesting to note, however, that in the last two decades
the philosophical contributions of Brentano have gained a new life as
an increasing number of philosophers from different fields are
rediscovering and elaborating on different themes from
Brentano's work. His contributions to the philosophy of mind
have been taken up and play a central role in the debate concerning
the nature of consciousness and the relation between
 consciousness and intentionality,
 the
 unity of consciousness
 and
 time-consciousness;
 his views on ethics have been inspired
 fitting attitude theories of value,
 which analyze ethical value in terms of correct or incorrect forms of
approval or disapproval. Moreover, the recent centenary of
Brentano's death (2017) has given occasion to a number of
conferences and publications that put Brentano's contribution at
the center of attention (cf., for example, Kriegel 2017). This shows
that the interest in Brentano's systematic contribution to
philosophy is still strong and vivid.