Franz Brentano

Born: 1838

Died: 1917, at the age of 79

Country of origin: Germany.

• Areas of focus:       Philosophy of Psychology, Ontology, Ethics, Theology
  
  
• Some of Brentano's influences:       John Stewart Mill, Auguste Comte,
  
  
• Contemporary Philosophers:       John Stewart Mill, Auguste Comte, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud.
  
  
• Major Books written by Brentano:
  
  
  • "Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint" (1874)
    
  • "Inquiry into Sense Psychology" (1907)
    
  • "On the Classification of Psychological Phenomena" (1911)
    
    
• Cocktail summary of Brentano's main ideas:
  
  
  Brentano stands at the beginning of the discipline in Philosophy that would become Phenomenology. He is usually considered a Philosopher of Psychology, since his main concern was the question of how the human mind interacts with the external world, and in the process he helped lay the theoretical foundations that would produce Psychology as an independent science. One of his many students was a young, unknown Austrian named Sigmund Freud.
  
  Brentano made a broad distinction between 2 general kinds of events, or Phenomenon, in nature: "Psychical Phenomenon" (acts of conscious mind) and "Physical Phenomenon" (acts of the physical world). What was the difference between how the conscious mind interacts with the external world and how external objects interact with each other? What is the basic difference between how the conscious mind works and how all objects in nature work?
  
  He argued that the difference between the 2 kinds of interactions was what he called "Intentionalism". Every psychological action has some content which is directed at some other object via a deliberate intention. A thought, a desire, a belief, a fear are all intentionally directed at something else.
  
  This seems yawningly obvious, but he argued that this "intention" (also called "Aboutness") is totally lacking in ordinary "external" physical actions. All natural objects act according to the laws of nature, and none of them "intend" to interact with each other. All acts of the external world "outside" of human consciousness is devoid of intention.
  
  For instance, a human mind intends to believe in a fact, but the moon doesn't intend to orbit the earth. The moon simply does this due to forces acting on it, but the human mind chooses to focus its belief on something. This idea, as obvious as it seems, is sometimes called "Act Psychology", referring to the Actions of human consciousness as opposed to the content of human consciousness.
  
  Brentano argued that Philosophy and Psychology should use the same rigorous scientific methods as the rest of the sciences, but at the same time he argued that science can never arrive at pure truth: experiments and measurements can only ever produce inexact results, and never the pure, perfect numbers of Mathematics. This latter idea would be developed in great detail later by his student Edmund Husserl.
  
  Brentano argued for an Empirical approach to analyzing human perception, which he defined as describing the details of perception from a first-person point of view. (Today, "empirical" would refer to a passive, third-person point of view). So his discipline was largely one of introspection, which didn't sit well with Behaviorist Psychology at the time, for whom this kind of reference to internal, unobservable causes was unscientific. Many considered his emphasis on rigorous scientific methods to be at odds with his actual practice.
  
  In describing how the mind perceives, Brentano argued that the mind is only capable of a single perception at a time. Multi-tasking is not possible - the human mind operates like a single-processor computer. Even when exposed to a seemingly multiple-sensory experience like music, the mind isn't taking in multiple input at the same time, but is simply hearing one note then remembering it when the next note is played and then abstractly connecting the two as a related event.
  
  Brentano almost constantly referred to Aristotle in almost all of his arguments, whom Brentano considered as the foundation of all of Philosophy. This reflected the growing resurgence of interest in Aristotle throughout the German-speaking world in the 19th century.
  
  He is also known for his style of arguing details, in that he stressed making distinctions in an idea rather than drawing an analogy to another idea. This involved coming up with examples of the exact opposite of a claim, and defending one against the other. He did not value arguing one point by making an analogy to something similar.
  
  
• Brentano praised & criticized:
  
  
  • Brentano looked back to the Medieval Scholastic tradition, and their understanding of Aristotle, as the roots for his ideas on Intentionality and this caused him to be viewed as something of a relic from the past by his contemporaries. He is sometimes criticized has having spent more time making independent observations on the details of psychological perception instead of actually constructing a new, coherent theory. But this is not really unique to Brentano, since most of the German world at the time wanted to avoid the grandiose building of intellectual edifices of the likes of Hegel.
    
    Brentano's observations inspired many of his students to develop disciplines that would far outshine their teacher, often obscuring his legacy in the shadows of their more fully-developed ideas. Such as, his students Sigmund Freud and Edmund Husserl each built upon Brentano's ideas and produced historical legacies far greater than Brentano's ever would. So he will probably forever be remembered as a tiller of the soil that would later produce the ideas that everyone remembers. But poor Franz never gets whole chapters devoted to him like so many of his students.
  
  
• Notable Facts about Franz Brentano:
  
  
  • Religious affiliation:
    Brentano was Catholic, and became a priest when he was 26 years old and a full professor at the University of Vienna when he was 34. However, he resigned from the priesthood when he was 35, due to his objections to the recently proclaimed doctrine of "Papal Infalability", that had been declared from the Vatican I council in 1870. He married when he was 42, but it cost him his job, since the Austrian government considered him to still be a priest and therefore forbade him to marry and still teach in his capacity (he had been hired as a full professor while he was a priest). So he resigned from his teaching post and moved to Leipzig to get married. A year later he was allowed to return to teaching in Vienna with his wife, but only as an "Unsalaried Lecturer" (Will Teach For Food). He remained a practicing Catholic all of his life.
    
    
  • Brentano was a popular teacher at the University of Vienna and had a reputation as a charismatic speaker. Some of his more famous students included Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, and Tomas Masayark (the founder of modern Czechoslovakia).
    
    
  • Franz Brentano's uncle was the famous German poet Clemens Brentano.
    
    
  • Brentano gradually went blind in his later years, causing him to loose the ability to read. But he continued to publish books with the help of his wife.
    
    
  • While Edmund Husserl is often considered the student who developed Brentano's ideas of perception most fully, Brentano didn't like how Husserl applied his ideas. Brentano objected to Husserl's idea of perceiving pure abstractions, which Brentano argued didn't exist.
    
    
  • Brentano wrote relatively little during his life and argued that Philosophy was best practiced by speaking rather than writing. Most of the books attributed to Brentano were produced after his death by his students, working from a massive collection of unpublished notes. (Apparently he practiced Philosophy in public by speaking, but still wrote Philosophy as a private vice). Much of his writings remains unpublished to this day, with this vault of writings referred to as "Nachlass".
    
    
  • Brentano died of ##### in Zurich, Switzerland where he had moved when World War I erupted. He chose to move to Switzerland because when Italy joined the Allies against both Austria and Germany, he felt an allegiance to all 3 countries, so he chose to escape the war in a neutral country.
    
    
• Quotes:
  
  
  • "The data of our consciousness make up a world which, taken in its entirety, falls into two great classes, the class of physical and the class of mental phenomena... Thus hearing a sound, seeing a colored object, sensing warm or cold, and the comparable states of imagination as well, are examples of what I mean... Examples of physical phenomena, on the other hand, are a color, a shape, a landscape, which I see; a musical chord which I hear; heat, cold, odor, which I sense... These examples may suffice as concrete illustrations of the distinction between the two classes."
    
    

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