Abstract
Brentano’s empiricism displays striking similarities with Mach’s phenomenalism. Both authors hold physical reality to be a “fiction” and reject the traditional view of truth and existence. In this paper, the author seeks to clarify some aspects of the Mach-Brentano debate, with a special focus on the theory of intentionality. First, he links this debate to an earlier one, namely to the debate about the mind-body relation. Secondly, he discusses some of Brentano’s objections and construes his intentionalism as an alternative to the psychophysical identity thesis.
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Notes
- 1.
The second page number always refers to the English translation, if there is one.
- 2.
The most extensive formulation of that critique can be found in (Brentano 1988). This book, edited by Chisholm and Marek, includes the whole correspondence and an essay on Mach’s Knowledge and Errors which Brentano dictated in 1905–6. Some letters from Brentano to Mach had been previously published in (Thiele 1968: 294–296) and in (Brentano 1964).
- 3.
(Albertazzi 2002: 43) provides some hints in this direction.
- 4.
I have slightly modified the English translation because it is manifestly influenced by Oskar Kraus’s interpretation, which I think is wrong. Kraus’s inability to hear, or willful blindness to, what Brentano actually says in this quote is properly unbelievable. Brentano explicitly says that “neither sense perception nor inner experience reveal substances to us”. Yet Kraus maintains that this is not Brentano’s own view, and that, for Brentano, “both sensation and inner perception exhibit substances to us”. Brentano claims that the “being” (das Wesen) “of which <mental phenomena> are properties”, so the soul or mental substance, “is a fiction to which no reality of any sort corresponds” (eine Fiktion, der keinerlei Wirklichkeit entspricht). Kraus maintains that it is not “the assumption that there is a substance” which is a fiction, but “the assumption that there is an attribute without any subject supporting it” (Brentano 1973: 258/11)!
- 5.
It is true, however, that Brentano, in his 1905–06 dictation on Knowledge and Error, attacks this view by pointing out that it leaves no room for philosophy at all (Brentano 1988: 23ff.). This is an interesting aspect of Brentano’s critique and one that deserves special attention—but it would take us too far from our main concerns to discuss it here.
- 6.
In a letter to Husserl dated 26 December 1893, Brentano rather oddly seems to reject both monism and dualism: “If I manage to refute monism, I hope I will then be able to demonstrate the implausibility of dualism as well and to advocate a view that is infinitely different from both” (Husserl 1994: 14–15).
- 7.
On Mach’s debt to Fechner, see also (Mach 1922: xxvii/xxxvi).
- 8.
See for example (Brentano 1988: 28): “The identification of the act of seeing with colors, of the act of hearing with sounds, of the presentation of a tree with the tree, is false and absurd. Mach has not even given an apparent demonstration of that absurd view; also missing is anything that can be viewed as an apparent demonstration of the fact that a scientific concept is nothing but a compound of sensible presentations, a compound which is of an individual character as are sensations.”
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Seron, D. (2019). Intentionality vs. Psychophysical Identity. In: Stadler, F. (eds) Ernst Mach – Life, Work, Influence. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04378-0_14
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