This paper aims to present and evaluate Brentano's account of the individuation of mental acts. In his early works, Brentano assimilated mental acts to tropes; however, he encountered difficulties in ...explaining their individuation, since the usual solutions for the individuation of tropes were not readily applicable to his theory of mental acts. In a later period, Brentano introduced into his psychology what he called the “soul,” and this allowed him to explain the individuation of mental acts. Finally, after his “reistic” turn, he excluded mental acts from his ontology, for he rejected a of any kind, including particulars, and admitted only things, or res (in Latin), that is, concrete particulars; in his late philosophy, there are no “thinkings,” but only “thinkers.” However, he still needed to explain what individuates different thinkers, and this was again the soul. In the conclusion, the paper critically compares the different theoretical options considered by Brentano.
Brentano's theory of intentionality Montague, Michelle
European journal of philosophy,
June 2023, 2023-06-00, 20230601, Volume:
31, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Chapters Five through Nine of Book Two of Brentano's 1874 Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint were republished in 1911 with a substantive Appendix of Brentano's remarks. In the Appendix Brentano ...makes a significant addition to his theory of intentionality. In particular, he introduces new modes within the mode of presentation itself. These new modes are needed to account for our thinking about anything in a relational structure (in recto and in obliquo modes) and for our thoughts about time (the temporal mode). I want to suggest that in the end Brentano simply takes relations to be different kinds of modes.
Le monisme matériel de Franz Brentano BUCCHIONI, GUILLAUME; Iglesias, Laurent
Dialogue : Canadian Philosophical Review,
12/2019, Volume:
58, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Le but de cet article est de proposer un examen de l’ontologie matérielle de Franz Brentano. Nous soutenons ici la thèse selon laquelle Brentano défend un type original de monisme. Ce monisme peut ...être vu comme la conjonction de trois théories : le réisme (la thèse selon laquelle il n’existe que des choses individuelles concrètes), le monisme de priorité (la thèse selon laquelle il n’y a qu’une seule substance) et le super-substantialisme (la thèse selon laquelle cette substance est l’espace).
The purposes of descriptive psychology Brandl, Johannes L.
European journal of philosophy,
June 2023, 2023-06-00, 20230601, Volume:
31, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In this paper, I discuss the different views of the founders of descriptive psychology in the 19th century about the meaning and purpose of this discipline and sketch a new plan for connecting ...descriptive psychology with the language‐critical tradition of analytic philosophy. I will show that the goals Hermann Lotze, Franz Brentano, and Wilhelm Dilthey set for descriptive psychology were too lofty for different reasons. The common problem they faced was how to reconcile the ideal of autonomous philosophical knowledge with the empirical relevance that descriptive psychology should have. Faced with this dilemma, I outline a new plan to conceive of descriptive psychology as a critical project aimed at overcoming the obstacles that language places in the way of our knowledge of mental phenomena.
The aim of this paper is to elucidate Franz Brentano's concept of immanent object through his own words and from his own perspective. The prevalent account of Brentano's revival of intentionality, ...his initial failure to distinguish between object and content, and his wrong‐headed immanentism, is largely derived from his students. Brentano's objection to it, although well known, is seldom heeded. In fact, plenty of guidelines have been provided by Brentano himself in his writings on how his concept of immanent object is to be understood. I begin with his distinction between two senses of “object,” which, I argue, must be clearly set apart from distinction between two modes of object. I then examine three different interpretations of the term “in‐existence”: the locative, the inherentist, and the objective interpretation. In the end, after dismissing the first two interpretations, I argue that Brentano is best understood as maintaining an objective and deflationary account of mental in‐existence.
Brentano is often considered the originator of the fitting-attitudes analysis of value, on which to be valuable is to be that which it’s fitting to value. But there has been comparatively little ...attention paid to Brentano’s argument for this analysis. That argument advances the stronger claim that fittingness is part of the analysis of normativity. Since the argument rests on an analogy between truth and fittingness, its impact may seem limited by the idiosyncratic features of Brentano’s later notion of truth. I argue, however, that the Brentanian argument is defensible even if fittingness is analogized to a more typical realist account of truth. The result is what I call the
worldly
Brentanian account of normativity. I defend this account as a form of naturalistic realism. I then show how the account can fare better than prominent alternatives against two kinds of error-theoretic arguments.
Franz Brentano's impact on the philosophy of his time and on 20th-century philosophy is considerable. The "sharp dialectician" (Freud) and "genial master" (Husserl) influenced philosophers of various ...allegiances, being acknowledged not only as the "grandfather of phenomenology" (Ryle) but also as an analytic philosopher "in the best sense of this term" (Chisholm). The fourteen new essays gathered together in this volume give an insight in three core issues of Brentano's philosophy: consciousness (sect.1), intentionality (sect. 2) and ontology and metaphysics (sect. 3). Two further sections of the volume deal with the posterity of his philosophy: in section 4, the legacy of his account of sense perception and feeling is discussed, while the history of Brentano's unpublished manuscripts is discussed in section 5. This section also presents an edition of a manuscript from 1899 on relations, along with the letters from Brentano to Marty which discuss this manuscript. The last part of section 5 contains the tekst of a public lecture given by Brentano on the laws of inference.
How do we individuate the senses, what exactly do we do when we do so, and why does it matter? In the following article, I propose a general answer to these related questions based on Franz ...Brentano's views on the senses. After a short survey of various answers offered in the recent literature on the senses, I distinguish between two major ways of answering this question, causally and descriptively, arguing that only answers giving priority to description and to the classification involved in it are on the right track for a general answer to the related questions. In the second part of the article, I argue that Brentano's descriptive psychology is an attractive candidate for such an answer. His descriptive psychology provides a plausible account of the classification involved in description, in particular regarding the classification of sensory qualities. I close the article by briefly explaining how Brentano spells out the priority of descriptive answers over causal ones.
In this paper, I develop a new version of the acquaintance view of the nature of introspection of phenomenal states. On the acquaintance view, when one introspects a current phenomenal state of ...one's, one bears to it the relation of introspective acquaintance. Extant versions of the acquaintance view neglect what I call the phenomenal modification problem. The problem, articulated by Franz Brentano in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, is that drawing introspective attention to one's current conscious experience may modify its phenomenology. Failing to take phenomenal modification into account affects the adequacy of extant versions of the acquaintance view. The purpose of this paper is to develop a better version, the integration account, that meets the phenomenal modification challenge while preserving the merits of other versions.
In this paper, I explore Husserl’s view on the normativity of intentionality and its neutralization. Husserl reaches his mature, normative-transcendental conception of intentionality by way of ...critical engagement with Brentano’s position. As opposed to Brentano, Husserl does not conceive of the normativity of intentionality as deriving from the more basic character of polar opposition. Normativity comes first and it is an original, though not universal determination of intentionality which is expressed in the identificatory achievement of constitution. Even where it is absent, this absence makes itself felt since neutrality is never the simple omission of normativity but essentially its neutralizing modification. The discussion of neutrality-modification in
Ideas I
is, however, problematic, as I will argue by drawing upon Husserl’s research manuscripts. I aim to show that neutralization is not a single but a group of closely related intentional modifications and that ways of neutralization are best conceptualized as changes of attitude. I will then examine phantasy and aesthetic consciousness as involving two such neutralizing attitudes. What they have in common is a spirit of playfulness in contrast to the serious commitment to truth that characterizes original intentionality. The neutralization of normativity takes place in play.
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