Brentano: Consciousness

This book guides the readers through Brentano's life and works, investigating into the inherent complexity of both his view of mental life and the related methodology.

Brentano's Descriptive Psychology marks a breakthrough into clarification of internal time, made possible by using his doctrine of intentionality (and modality) of consciousness. Husserl's version of descriptive psychology, a pure phenomenological psychology, according to its author tries to overcome Brentano's (naturalistic) description of internal experience by explicitly considering the intentional content of mental events, and the different categories of objects as objects of a possible consciousness. Husserl's investigations on internal time are an example of a quite specific sort of genetic (...) inquiry, complementary to the descriptive one. Meinong, when discussing the relation of representation and perception of time, differentiates between the time as given in a representation (act time), in different sorts of (Meinongian) objects (object time), and in contents (content time). These questions of a Brentanist temporality problem are reconsidered and brought to a Husserlian conclusion. (shrink)

The paper contends that abstraction lies at the core of the philosophical and methodological rupture that occurred between Husserl and his mentor Franz Brentano. To accomplish this, it explores the notion of abstraction at work in these two thinkers’ methodological discussions through their respective claims regarding the structure of consciousness, and shows that how Husserl and Brentano analyze the structure of consciousness conditions and strictly delineates the nature and reach of their methods of inquiry. The paper pays close attention to (...) intentionality, founding (Fundierung), and qualitative modification (qualitative Modifikation) understood as principles of consciousness. While intentionality has been the topic of numerous discussions surrounding these two thinkers’ work, founding and qualitative modification have slipped under the radar despite the fact that they hold—as I intend to show—the key to shedding new light on their respective methods of inquiry. More specifically, the paper explicates the ways in which Brentano’s notion of founding (understood as a relationship between whole acts) and his failure to identify radical-qualitative modification as a principle of consciousness preclude him from offering a successful model for philosophical universalizing thought. It is my hope to show that Husserl’s rethinking of founding as a relationship between certain structural moments of acts along with his novel notion of qualitative modification ground his attempt to carve a new method of philosophical inquiry—albeit jejune and ambiguous at the time of the Investigations, yet nevertheless able to successfully negotiate the problems faced by his predecessor. (shrink)

Phenomenologists call for the abandoning of all philosophical theorizing in favor of a descriptive study of the "things themselves" as they are given. On its face, such a study of appearances would appear to have little to contribute to ontology, traditionally understood as the science of being and its most fundamental categories. But phenomenologists have not hesitated to draw ontological conclusions from their phenomenological investigations. Phenomenology and its ontological pretensions have come under attack, however, from philosophers of a wide variety (...) of persuasions . ;The project of this dissertation is to re-examine the relationship of phenomenology, conceived as a philosophical method, to ontology. I proceed by undertaking systematic critical examinations of the attempts of thee central figures in the phenomenological tradition to arrive at categorial ontological results upon the basis of phenomenological investigations. At issue are Brentano's descriptive psychological studies of so-called mental phenomena in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint , Husserl's static transcendental phenomenological study of the structures of pure consciousness in Ideas I, II, and III, and Sartre's phenomenological ontology of consciousness in Being and Nothingness. For each of these cases, I attempt to ascertain the precise way in which the application of phenomenological methods gives rise to specific ontological claims or "results". In none of these cases, I argue, does the thinker in question succeed in producing ontological assertions in a sufficiently phenomenological fashion. All, that is, depart to some extent from the phenomenological ideal of an ontology arrived at in accordance with an unprejudiced examination and description of "the things themselves". In the final chapter I ask whether the particular failures of these thinkers to have formulated ontological claims in a phenomenologically satisfactory manner implies the general failure of all phenomenological approaches to ontology. I argue that while principled reasons can be given why a truly phenomenological ontology must remain an unattainable ideal, it is an ideal that philosophers ought not abandon. (shrink)

If the inner consciousness of a mental state is a part of the mental state itself, then one is forced to admit an 'inner consciousness of the inner consciousness'. This counterintuitive consequence can however be avoided, if we conceive of the inner consciousness of the mental state as a 'mode of giveness' of the state itself. This paper discusses Brentano's theory of inner consciousness from the point of view of Husserl's philosophy.

Franz Brentano (1838-1917) is a key figure in the development of Twentieth Century thought. It was his work that set Husserl on to the road of phenomenology and intentionality, that inspired Meinong's theory of the object which influenced Bertrand Russell, and the entire Polish school of philosophy. ^Descriptive Psychology presents a series of lectures given by Brentano in 1887; they were the culmination of his work, and the clearest statement of his mature thought. It was this later period which proved (...) to be so important in the work of his student, Husserl. This is the first English translation of his work. Benito Muller has added a concise introduction which places Brentano within the history of philosophy and psychology, and locates his influence in contemporary thought. (shrink)

Den Plan, seine Untersuchungen zur Deskriptiven Psychologie in einem umfassenden Werk zur Darstellung zu bringen, hat Brentano nicht verwirklicht. Neben kleineren Schriften zu diesem Gedankenkreis sind aber die Kollegmanuskripte der 1887 bis 1891 unter wechselnden Titeln gehaltenen Wiener Vorlesungen zur Deskriptiven Psychologie erhalten.

Dans son ouvrage de 1874, repris et complété en 1911, puis augmenté à nouveau par une série d’appendices tardifs, dans l’édition procurée par Oscar Kraus, en 1924, Brentano n’est pas seulement celui qui ouvre le dossier très complet des questions psychologiques débattues dans l’après-Kant et jusqu’à la fin du XIXe siècle, dans l’espace intellectuel germanique, mais aussi et principalement anglophone; pas seulement celui qui, à la faveur de la redéfinition, à la fois très ancienne et novatrice, des phénomènes psychiques, caractérisés (...) par l’inexistence intentionnelle de leur objet immanent, ouvre la voie à un nouveau développement de la psychologie, ni rationnelle, ni expérimentale, mais proprement empirique, celle-là même qui se transformera ensuite en psychologie descriptive, puis phénoménologie; par la diversité de son « École », dont on mesure mieux aujourd’hui le rayonnement et la fécondité , par la richesse et le rayonnement de sa propre pensée en philosophie morale, théorie de la connaissance, logique, ontologie, Brentano est enfin reconnu en France – comme c’est déjà le cas depuis longtemps dans beaucoup de pays anglosaxons – comme une figure majeure, après Bolzano, de l’histoire de la philosophie autrichienne et comme un puissant interlocuteur encore présent dans les débats les plus contemporains en philosophie de l’esprit ou en ontologie. (shrink)

Dieser Band präsentiert den Text der Originalausgabe von 1907, drei weitere Arbeiten über ein optisches Paradoxon sowie sieben bisher unveröffentlichte Basisuntersuchungen zum Problem Sinneswahrnehmungen, die Brentano in eine zweite ...

Ganz allgemein hat sich die Ansicht festgesetzt, daß eine psychische Betätigung ohne irgendwelce Intensität einen Widerspruch involvieren würde. Eine Null von Intensität, meint man, müsse für die psychische Tätigkeit selbst den Nullpunkt bilden. Danach käme dann z. B., auch wenn wir einen Begriff wie Wahrheit, Beziehung, Zukunft oder irgendeinen Zahlbegriff denken, diesem Denken immer eine Intensität zu. Und ebenso wäre jedem Urteilsakt und jeder Gemütstätigkeit, dem ruhigen Vorsatz nicht minder als dem aufgeregten Affekt, stets eine gewisse Intensität eigen. Doch, während (...) beim Empfinden die Intensität des Empfindens von der des Empfundenen abhängig ist, konnte beim Denken jener Begriffe eine ähnliche Abhängigkeit seiner Intensität von der im Inhalt Gedachten beschlossenen nicht angenommen werden. Denn was z. B. fände sich in der Zahl 3, das der Intensität eines Schalles oder Geruches verwandt wäre? (shrink)

Ein befreundeter Physiologie machte mich jüngst mit einem überraschenden Falle optischer Täuschung bekannt, der - ich erfrug nicht durch wen - erst kürzlich, ohne Beigabe eines Erklärungsgrundes, veröffentlicht worden war.

Unlike the first English translation in 1974, this edition contains the text corresponding to Brentano's original 1874 edition.

Im Zentrum der 1874 erschienenen bewußtseinspsychologischen Abhandlungen Brentanos steht die Beschreibung und Analyse des Psychischen. Damit bahnte sich jene Abwendung von der sensualistischen Tradition der philosophischen Bewußtseinslehre an, die in der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls vollendet wurde.

This is a selection from Chapter 1 of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.

§ 1. Selon la tradition, les sens sont au nombre de cinq. Ce nombre semble toutefois insuffisant à certains. Aristote déjà avait soulevé la question de savoir si ce qu’on appelle le sens du toucher ne devait pas être divisé en un sens du chaud et du froid et en un sens de l’aqueux et du sec. D’autres ont voulu distinguer un sens musculaire, et l’on a aussi parlé d’un sens temporel et d’un sens spatial...

In this paper, I shall argue that both cognitivism and liberal contractualism defend a pre-moral conception of human desire that has its origin in the Hobbesian and Humean tradition that both theories share. Moreover, the computational and syntactic themes in cognitive science support the notion, which Gauthier evidently shares, that the human mind – or, in Gauthier’s case, the mind of “economic man” – is a purely formal mechanism, characterized by logical and mathematical operations. I shall conclude that a single (...) conception of human behaviour runs through the various dominant psychological, moral and political theories of analytic inspiration. (shrink)