Thinker · TH-0164
Franz Brentano
Franz Brentano was a German philosopher and psychologist, a former priest, who taught at Würzburg and Vienna and spent his last years in Florence…
On the Coordinates: 1.3.3 Intentionality
Also known as Franz Clemens Brentano
1838 – 1917 · Würzburg; Vienna; Florence; Zurich
Traditions: Modern European
Franz Brentano was a German philosopher and psychologist, a former priest, who taught at Würzburg and Vienna and spent his last years in Florence and Zurich. In Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint he reintroduced the scholastic notion of intentionality and proposed it as the mark of the mental: every mental act is directed at an object. His students and hearers included Husserl, Meinong and Twardowski, and his ideas fed into both phenomenology and early analytic philosophy.
Key ideas
- Every mental phenomenon is directed towards an object; this 'intentional inexistence' distinguishes the mental from the physical.
- Mental phenomena divide into presentations, judgements, and phenomena of love and hate.
- Descriptive psychology, the careful description of consciousness, should precede explanatory psychology.
- In ethics he held that some emotions of love and hate are correct, which grounds knowledge of good and bad.
Major works
- On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (1862)
- Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, 1874)
- The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, 1889)
In the conversation
- Question My daughter says the thermostat wants the room warmer. Is she wrong?
- Reading group Reading group: aboutness from Brentano to Husserl, with Xuanzang alongside
In the Coordinates
The questions of philosophy where Franz Brentano takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.
- 1.3.3 Intentionality How can one thing be about another thing?