Franz Brentano
Edited by Uriah Kriegel (Rice University)
About this topic
Summary | Franz Brentano (1838-1917) published relatively little in his lifetime. But through his lectures he was extraordinarily influential. His best-known contribution to modern philosophy is the notion of intentionality, but he also developed original accounts of consciousness, judgment, truth, existence, substance, part-whole relations, emotion, value, beauty, and other central philosophical notions. The literature features both scholarly debates on what Brentano's view exactly was in each area and critical debates on the plausibility of these views. While such debates have been uninterrupted in the German-speaking world (as well as in Polish and Italian philosophy) throughout the 20th century, in the English-speaking world awareness of Brentano's philosophy is more recent and owes much to Roderick Chisholm's work. The term "Brentano School" is often used to refer to later generations of philosophers working within general paradigms he set out. Brentano's ideas propagated from his students in at least six directions: from Husserl to the Phenomenological movement, from Meinong to the so-called Graz School and Italian Gestalt Psychology, from Twardowski to Polish philosophy and logic, from Stumpf to the so-called Berlin School and German psychology, from Marty to the Prague School of orthodox Brentanianism, and from Ehrenfles to early Austrian economic thought. Some scholars have argued that Analytic Philosophy itself is an Austro-English development whose source is the work of Bolzano and Brentano. |
Key works | Chisholm 1976 has spawned an enormous literature on Brentano's notion of intentionality; a recent discussion is Crane 2006. Brentano's account of consciousness has recently received renewed attention - see Textor 2006. Brentano's contributions to logic and the theory of judgment were more widely discussed in the 1980s - see Chisholm 1976 and Simons 1987. For Brentano's metaphysics and mereology, see Chisholm 1978 and Mulligan & Smith 1985. The most thorough and comprehensive discussion of Brentano's value theory is still Chisholm 1986, but the theory has been the focus of sustained interest of late - see Danielsson & Olson 2007. G.E. Moore's review of Brentano 1889/1969 has been influential for its early reception - see Moore 1903. Many of Brentano's lecture notes have been edited posthumously by his students Alfred Kastil and Oskar Kraus; it is important to know that they sometimes interpolate their own understanding of Brentano into the text, and the reliability of their interpolations is debatable. Many of Brentano's original manuscripts are held by the Houghton Library at Harvard and can be consulted online; other manuscripts are held in Graz and Wurzburg. |
Introductions | Brentano's best known work is Brentano 1874, a relatively early book that presents a systematic picture of the nature and structure of mind; it is so clearly written that it still stands as the best introduction to Brentano's work. Also influential has been his Brentano 1889/1969, which defends an early version of a fitting-attitude account of value. Many of Brentano's articles, lectures, and letters on judgment, knowledge, and truth are collected in Brentano 1930/1966; and on metaphysics and mereology in Brentano 1933/1981. The most comprehensive and systematic English-language introduction to Brentano's philosophy is Albertazzi 2006. An extremely lucid exposition of Brentano's epistemology and metaethics is Chisholm 1986. An Early English-language collection on Brentano is McAlister 1976; a more recent one is Jacquette 2004. For discussion of the central ideas in the Brentano School, see Smith 1994; an extremely useful visual device is Dewalque 2013. |
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Related categories
Subcategories:
Brentano: Consciousness (239)
Brentano: Intentionality (268)
Brentano: Judgment (170)
Brentano: Value (183)
Brentano: Metaphysics (237)
Brentano's Works (145)
Brentano School (519)
Brentano, Misc (286)
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