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For more information on Franz Clemens Brentano, visit Britannica.com.
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| Biography: Franz Clemens Brentano |
The German philosopher and psychologist Franz Clemens Brentano (1838-1917) is best known for his work in establishing psychology as an independent science.
Franz Brentano was born on Jan. 16, 1838, at Marienberg in the Rhineland into a family of the nobility, whose lineage is traceable to the 13th century and includes many famous members, among them the authors Clemens Brentano and Bettina von Arnim. Franz studied at the gymnasium at Aschaffenburg and then at the universities of Munich, Würzburg, Berlin, and Münster (1856-1860). Raised in an extremely pious and orthodox Catholic household, Brentano early decided to enter the priesthood and was ordained in 1864.
From the first his interests were divided almost equally between theology, philosophy, and mathematics. After a period of increasing doubts about fundamental dogmas of the church, the declaration of papal infallibility in 1870 precipitated his final break with the church 3 years later. Thereafter he turned his attention wholeheartedly to philosophy, which he was determined to pursue in a scientific manner, explicitly rejecting the then dominant trend of German idealism.
After the publication of his best-known work, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), Brentano accepted a chair at the University of Vienna. In 6 years of teaching he gathered there a brilliant set of students through whom his own thought was further developed and more widely propagated. Brentano's teaching activity was disturbed by pressures from reactionary authorities who invoked a law forbidding marriage to clerics. In order to marry, Brentano had to give up his professorship and move to Leipzig. Thereafter he was allowed to return to his circle of colleagues and students, but only as a privatdozent, or lecturer. For 14 years he continued in this position; numerous efforts to restore him to his professorship were derailed by political intrigues. Finally, in 1890, after the death of his wife, Brentano left Vienna and settled in Florence, where he devoted himself to writing and to correspondence with his wide circle of students.
In addition to his work on psychology, Brentano published important works on Aristotle, on ethics, and on esthetics. Brentano's work offers original insights in all the main branches of philosophy from logic to natural theology. He defended the objectivity of value judgments in ethics and esthetics and labored to construct a philosophical theism and a doctrine of immortality.
The onset of World War I drove him from his Italian haven to Zurich, where, now totally blind, he continued to dictate new manuscripts. He died in Zurich on March 17, 1917, and was survived by his second wife and a son, Johannes.
Further Reading
There are few studies in English on Brentano. Two are important: Gustav Bergmann, Realism: A Critique of Brentano and Meinong (1967), and Jan Srzednicki, Franz Brentano's Analysis of Truth (1965), which contains a reliable bibliography of Brentano's works, some of which are available in English.
Additional Sources
Chisholm, Roderick M., Brentano and intrinsic value, Cambridge Cambridgeshire; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Smith, Barry, Ph. D., Austrian philosophy: the legacy of Franz Brentano, Chicago: Open Court, 1994.
| Philosophy Dictionary: Franz Clemens Brentano |
Brentano, Franz Clemens (1838-1917) German philosopher and psychologist. His teaching at the universities of Wurzburg and Vienna may be regarded as the foundation of the phenomenological movement in philosophy. Brentano became a priest in 1864 but left the Church in 1873. His major work was Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874, trs. as Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, 1973) which rehabilitates the medieval concentration upon the ‘directedness’ or intentionality of the mental as a fundamental aspect of thought and consciousness. Brentano also wrote on theological matters, and on moral philosophy, where the directedness of emotions allows a notion of their correct and incorrect objects, thus permitting him a notion of moral objectivity.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Franz Brentano |
Bibliography
See studies by G. Bergmann (1967), A. C. Rancurello (1968), and R. M. Chisholm (1986).
| Psychoanalysis: Franz von Brentano |
1838-1917
Franz von Brentano, a German Dominican philosopher and theologian, was born in Marienberg in 1838 and died in Zürich in 1917. His ideas influenced Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It was in 1874, the year Brentano published his Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Psychology from an empirical standpoint), that the young Sigmund Freud, an eighteen-year old student, wrote to his friend Eduard Silberstein[RB1], "I, a doctor and atheist empiricist, I have signed up for two courses in philosophy . . . One of the courses—you will be amazed when you hear this—concerns the existence of God; Prof. Brentano, who is teaching the course, is a man, a thinker, and a marvelous philosopher." On March 7, 1875, he added, "Both of us (me and Paneth) have grown closer to him, we sent him a letter with our objections and he invited us to his home, refuted us, seemed to take an interest in us. . . . Concerning this remarkable man (he is a believer, a teleologist [!] and a Darwinist, and damned intelligent, even brilliant), who in many ways satisfies the requirements of the ideal, I will have much to tell you in person. But I can give you this piece of news now: under Brentano's influence especially (which has had a maturing effect), I have made a decision to sit for the doctorate in philosophy and will study philosophy and zoology."
The most detailed report of the visit to Brentano shows how he influenced Freud: "He totally condemns [Herbart's] a priori constructions in psychology and feels that it's unforgivable that he never thought of considering spontaneous experience or provoked experience to see if they confirmed his gratuitous hypotheses; he claims unhesitatingly to belong to the empirical school, which applies the method of natural science to philosophy and, in particular, to psychology (this is, in fact, the principal advantage of his philosophy, the only thing that makes it bearable for me), and he revealed to us several interesting psychological observations that show the inanity of Herbart's speculations. According to him, it is more necessary to submit certain specific problems to more extensive research, in order to achieve definite partial results, than to claim to embrace philosophy as a whole, which is not possible, given that philosophy and psychology are still young sciences, which cannot expect any support, especially from physiology."
Aside from the affirmation of empiricism and the primacy of observation and experiment that Freud would never forget, the meeting with the Catholic theologian is the only time that Freud, "an atheistic Jew," had a momentary metaphysical hesitation. He described the experience as follows: "Ever since Brentano imposed his God on me with ridiculous facility, through his arguments, I fear being seduced one of these days by proofs in favor of spiritualism, homeopathy, Louise Lateau, etc. . . . It's a fact that his God is nothing but a logical principle and that I have accepted it as such. Yet, we proceed down a slippery slope once we acknowledge the concept of God. It remains to be seen at which point we stumble. Moreover, his God is very strange. . . . It is impossible to refute Brentano before hearing him out, studying him, exploring his thought. Confronted with such a rigorous dialectician, we must strengthen our intellect by addressing his arguments before confronting him directly."
Freud's connection to philosophy lasted longer than this first contact, and it was Franz von Brentano who suggested to Theodor Gomperz, five years later, that Freud translate the twelfth volume of the Complete Works of John Stuart Mill (1880a), which contained "On the Emancipation of Women," "Plato," "The Social Question," and "Socialism."
Bibliography
von Brentano, Franz. (1874) Psychology from an empirical standpoint. Edited by Oskar Kraus, English edition edited by Linda L. McAlister, translated by Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister, with a new introduction by Peter Simons. London, New York: Routledge, 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. (1989a) [1871-81, 1910]). The letters ofSigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871-1881 (Walter Boehlich, Ed.; Arnold J. Pomerans, Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
—ALAINDE MIJOLLA
| Wikipedia: Franz Brentano |
| Western Philosophy 19th-century philosophy |
|
|---|---|
| Full name | Franz Brentano |
| Born | January 16, 1838 Marienberg am Rhein |
| Died | March 17, 1917 Zürich |
| School/tradition | School of Brentano |
Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano (January 16, 1838 – March 17, 1917) was an influential German philosopher and psychologist whose influence was felt by other such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, Kazimierz Twardowski and Alexius Meinong, who followed and adapted his views.
Contents |
Brentano was born at Marienberg am Rhein, near Boppard. He studied philosophy at the universities of Munich, Würzburg, Berlin (with Adolf Trendelenburg) and Münster. He had a special interest in Aristotle and scholastic philosophy. He wrote his dissertation in Tübingen On the manifold sense of Being in Aristotle. Subsequently he began to study theology and entered the seminary in Munich and then Würzburg, preparing to become a Roman Catholic Jesuit priest (ordained August 6, 1864). In 1865–66 he wrote and defended his habilitation essay and theses and began to lecture at the University of Würzburg. His students in this period included, among others, Carl Stumpf and Anton Marty. Between 1870 and 1873 Brentano was heavily involved in the debate on papal infallibility. A strong opponent of such dogma, he eventually gave up his priesthood. Following Brentano's religious struggles, Stumpf (who was studying at the seminary at the time) was also drawn away from the church.
In 1874 Brentano published his major work: "Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint" and from 1874 to 1895 taught at the University of Vienna. Among his students were Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Rudolf Steiner, T.G. Masaryk, Sigmund Freud, Kazimierz Twardowski 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. He was permitted to return to the university only as a Privatdozent. After his retirement he moved to Florence in Italy, transferring to Zürich at the outbreak of the First World War, where he died in 1917.
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Brentano is best known for his reintroduction of the concept of intentionality — a concept derived from scholastic philosophy — to contemporary philosophy in his lectures and in his work Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkte (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint). While often simplistically summarised as "aboutness" or the relationship between mental acts and the external world, Brentano defined it as the main characteristic of mental phenomena, by which they could be distinguished from physical phenomena. Every mental phenomenon, every psychological act has content, is directed at an object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire etc. has an object that they are about: the believed, the wanted. Brentano used the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the status of the objects of thought in the mind. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to distinguish psychical phenomena and physical phenomena, because, as Brentano defined it, physical phenomena lacked the ability to generate original intentionality, and could only facilitate an intentional relationship in a second-hand manner, which he labeled derived 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), p. 88-89. |
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He is also well known for claiming that Wahrnehmung ist Falschnehmung ('perception is misception' or literally 'truth-grasping is false-grasping') that is to say perception is erroneous. In fact he maintained that external, sensory perception could not tell us anything about the de facto existence of the perceived world, which could simply be illusion. However, we can be absolutely sure of our internal perception. When I hear a tone, I cannot be completely sure that there is a tone in the real world, but I am absolutely certain that I do hear. This awareness, of the fact that I hear, is called internal perception. External perception, sensory perception, can only yield hypotheses about the perceived world, but not truth. Hence he and many of his pupils (in particular Carl Stumpf and Edmund Husserl) thought that the natural sciences could only yield hypotheses and never universal, absolute truths as in pure logic or mathematics.
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. Of course, when he makes this change he is not only recanting this portion (as he tried to maintain), he is also recanting everything that he derived from the claim that internal perception was flawless.[1]
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 sufficient 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 or not. 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 object 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). 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.
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