Franz Brentano
(Marienberg, present-day Germany, 1838-Zurich, 1917) German philosopher.He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1864, a state he left ten years later, in 1873.He investigated metaphysical questions through logical-linguistic analysis, thereby distinguishing himself from both English empiricists and academic Kantianism.His studies in the field of psychology introduced the concept of "intentionality", which would have a direct influence on Husserl, according to which the phenomena of consciousness are distinguished by having a content, that is, by "referring" to some object.He in turn defined "intentional existence", which corresponds, for example, to colors or sounds.His works include On the multiple significance of being according to Aristotle (1862), The origin of moral knowledge (1889) and Aristotle and his worldview (1911).
Franz Brentano
Member of a family of literati and intellectuals, Franz Brentano soon started on the path of studies , with a marked predilection for philosophy.Sincerely Catholic, in 1864 he wore the felling habit; meanwhile, he had studied philosophy in Berlin and Munich.His ethical-religious ideal was that of a liberal Catholicism, an ideal that after the definition of the dogma of the infallibility of the pope (1870) and the rigid position adopted by the Church led him to a crisis of conscience that would culminate (in 1873) with the abandonment of the priestly habit.
At the same time, his philosophical studies led to Aristotle, although his was a modern Aristotelianism, frankly empirical in its approach and in its methods.He dedicated numerous works to Aristotle's philosophy, including On the multiple significance of being according to Aristotle (1862) and The Aristotelian doctrine on the origin of the human spirit ( 1911).In 1866 he began, as an assistant professor, his career as a university professor; in 1873 he was appointed to the University of Würzburg, where his position became difficult; Called to Vienna in 1874, the most fruitful and happy period of his teaching began there.The novelty of the approach to psychological and ethical problems gave him much fame and allowed him to found a school in which Krause and Husserl were especially distinguished.
From 1874 is the edition of his masterpiece: Psychology from the empirical point of view , whose theoretical core would be exposed years later (1911) by the author himself in the Classification of psychic phenomena .Accepting the Aristotelian point of view, thoroughly known by the author, the work classifies psychic phenomena according to the different way they refer to the object.Brentano accepts the division into three classes: representations, judgments and affective relationships (interest, love).He cares to defend this distinction particularly against all those who do not want to see any real difference between representation and judgment.Representation simply means being present in consciousness; the judgment, having the object of representation as true or false.
The widely spread opinion that the judgment consists of bringing together or separating in the field of our representations, that is, that the judgment is a thinking that puts two objects in relation, is criticized by the author, showing that the meeting of subject and predicate is not a necessary requirement for the judgment.He proves this by reducing categorical statements to existential propositions.Thus, the categorical proposition "all men are mortal" has the same meaning as the existential proposition "there is no immortal man." Even insisting on the necessary unity of all our psychic phenomena, it assigns first place to representation, second to judgment and third to feeling-will, consciously opposing the voluntaristic tendency of modern psychology.
In the appendix to the Italian translation of this book, taking again a motif already developed in Psychology from the empirical point of view (1874), he defines the characteristic of all psychic activity as the reference to something as an object."But it is not necessary that the object of my thought exists, but, in the case of a negation, the one that exists is expressly excluded; the only necessary term of the psychic relation is the thinker."From this Brentano's fundamental neo-Kantian position is clear (despite the fact that he remains opposed to currents even closer to Kant): he hopes to find, in a description of the phenomena psychics conceived as a pure description of the activity of the subject, the absolute certainty on which to base the objectivity of knowledge.That is why the current that had its starting point in the thought of Franz Brentano is called "psychologism".
Despite the fertility and relative tranquility of his early years in Vienna, Brentano's political-religious disputes with opinion and the authorities and philosophical polemics with students and former students ended up embittering his teaching; thus, in 1880 he abandoned the chair and continued his activity as a free teacher until 1895, the year in which he was absent from Austria forever, saying goodbye in a famous work: My last vows for Austria (1895 ).Since then he lived almost always in Florence, where he had found esteem and affection in the group that gathered around Giovanni Papini, Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni in the magazine Leonardo.
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