The Brentano Puzzle

Roberto Poli, Roberto Poli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351893688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Even if the width and the depth of Brentano's intellectual legacy are now quite well known, those asked to list the principal philosophers of the 19th century, very rarely do mention his name. We may call this puzzle the problem of Brentano's 'invisibility'. One component of the Brentano's puzzle is that a number of Brentano's outstanding pupils achieved their own success and founded their own schools. Suffice to mention Husserl's phenomenology, Twardowski's Lvov-Warsaw school and Meinong's Graz school. The personal success and academic recognition attained by these exponents of Brentano's school (in the broad sense) have come to obscure their common origins. The oblivion into which Franz Brentano's thought fell was in part due also to the subsequent split between analytic philosophy and phenomenology. The book reconstructs elements of the 'map' of the Brentanists, revitalizing knowledge of the theoretical complexity of their debates, of their unitariness, and of their style. Last but not least, analyses of the relevance of those discussions for contemporary philosophical and scientific debate are also considered.

1 The Brentano Puzzle: An Introduction

ROBERTO POLI

I would like to centre the Brentano puzzle on the problem of Brentano’s invisibility. Those asked to list the principal philosophers of the nineteenth century usually reply with names like those of Nietzsche, Mach, Dilthey, Mill, Frege, Kirkegaard. Perhaps Herbart, Comte, Simmel and Marx. Sometimes Bradley, Bolzano or Lotze are remembered. Very rarely, the name of Brentano is mentioned. Given this state of affairs, one should consider whether the call for a ‘Brentano revival’ has the sense of an exercise in philosophical archaeology, or whether this is a much more general problem which merits at least an attempt at a reply.

In order to account for Brentano’s invisibility, we must begin with a number of general observations (Albertazzi and Poli 1993b, Albertazzi, Libardi and Poli 1996b, Albertazzi and Poli 1997, Poli 1997b, Poli 1998).

First of all, let me recall that there are at least four general background features of the philosophy developed in the German-speaking countries — Germany especially — from 1830 onwards that warrant attention.

1. When the excesses of idealism died away, philosophy started to be developed in a psychological fashion. Perhaps the most persuasive evidence for this is the fact that university chairs of philosophy were increasingly and systematically awarded to psychologists, a process attended by the founding of the first laboratories of psychology.

2. The spread of profound philological interest in language and the simultaneous birth of linguistics. We need only mention Humboldt, the Grimm brothers, Bopp, Hermann and Steinthal.

3. The revival of Kant in the form of neo-Kantianism. Of course, when we start using labels with a prefix like ‘neo-,’ we are emphasising not only links and similarities, but also and especially differences. Characteristic of the neo-Kantians, precisely because they were neo-Kantians and not simply Kantians, was their rejection of certain important aspects of Kantian thought. In particular, they were sceptical of the doctrine of the forms of intuition (space and time) as pure forms of intuition.

4. The revival of Aristotelian studies. In the second half of nineteenth century new editions of, and commentaries on, Aristotle were published by Schwegler, Bonitz, Tricot and others. In addition, there was Prantl’s history of logic, Steinthal’s history of grammar and ancient logic, Trendelenburg’s history of the doctrine of the categories. All these studies, many of which resulted from a new philological sensibility, laid the basis for the modem study of Aristotle (Melandri, 1990).

The features we have summed up give an understanding of the general background, but it is clear that they cannot give an answer to our main question, namely the problem of Brentano’s invisibility.

I will now turn to my analysis of the reasons explaining Brentano’s invisibility. My answer is divided in three parts.

The first part is rooted in the assessment of Brentano’s philosophical theory. As is well known, the reconstruction of Brentano’s thought is still flawed and incomplete. Some of the reasons for this are today quite obvious and very familiar. Consider the following factors:

1. Brentano himself published very little during his lifetime compared with his vast and still largely unpublished Nachlaß.

2. A significant proportion of the posthumous works published under Brentano’s name were composed, structured and even written by his pupils using methods which, to be charitable, we may call philologically improper. The essential fact, however, is that his unpublished works exceed both in quantity and, in certain cases, in theoretical importance his published oeuvre.

3. The loss of the exercise-books used by Brentano’s pupils to take notes at his lectures. For many years these notebooks were the principal source of information for other pupils and friends.

4. The great emphasis laid by Brentano on oral teaching, which he regarded as more important than his written production.

In his introduction to the Italian translation of the second volume of Psychology, Puglisi stressed this very emphatically:

The vividness of his spoken words, the varied expression of his arguments, immediately evoked that impulse which was lacking in his writings. Hence it has been rightly said that the chief characteristic of Franz Brentano’s teaching was that it was oral. Perhaps, like Socrates, he preferred to teach through speech, because thus one teaches not only philosophy but also how to philosophise, thereby spurring intellectual enquiry (Puglisi 1913, 8).

5. Moreover, I must point out that most of Brentano’s thought was set out in his correspondence: I need only cite the 1400 letters exchanged between him and Marty and which constitute a large part of his posthumously published work; or the fact that his letters addressed to one scholar were then passed on to others, who in turn intervened in the exchange of ideas (Baumgartner 1993, 239).

6. A further aspect of the problem is the blindness that afflicted Brentano in the last years of his life. Unable to write, he was forced to dictate his thoughts. Consequently, when he had to correct, modify or supplement previous writings or dictations, he found it easier to correct an already written text by dictating it anew. One thus often finds different versions of the same argument, sometimes with minimal changes, sometimes with much more substantial differences.

The above features – especially Brentano’s emphasis on oral teaching, and the scantiness of his published work compared with the enormous quantity of his manuscripts and correspondence – are also of general relevance because they are rooted in Brentano’s method of ‘doing’ philosophy. We know that the distinguishing feature of his philosophy was its empirical bias, its insistence on rigorous and partial analysis rather than on the construction of systems by self-definition coherent and self sufficient. Given these features, it comes as no surprise that the same problem should be examined on several separate occasions and that different solutions should be proposed for it.

This procedure has a certain amount of inner coherence. Although Brentano always began his analysis with specific topics and problems, he proposed solutions which then reverberated throughout the entire edifice of his philosophy. This, as we have seen, is a manner of philosophising which takes the natural sciences as its model. Puglisi wrote,

Franz Brentano did not write a system of philosophy. He addressed certain fundamental problems in the same way as scientists contribute to a slowly-developing science by means of the relatively small-scale study of individual laws… For Brentano it was a contradiction to work according to the method of the natural sciences and to write a large quantity of bulky volumes (Puglisi 1913, 16–17).

These factors also account for the different solutions that Brentano proposed for the problems he addressed. His thought, in fact, displays a continuity of method and a permanence of problems, but not a univocity of solutions.

7. The seventh component of this first list of reasons is Brentano’s constant reference to Aristotle. As already said, the second half of the 19th century saw an explicit philological revival of Aristotle and, as a matter of fact, Brentano’s first work on Aristotle, published in 1862, was dedicated to Trendelenburg. But Brentano was the only thinker at the time, or one of the very few, who presented a reading of Aristotle which offered not only an erudite philological exegesis, but also theoretical analysis.

8. The eight and last reason concerns the ‘scholastic’ atmosphere of certain of his reflections, not to mention the apparently scholastic topics that underpinned his theory. This explains why, according to Tatarkiewicz, “among his contemporaries Brentano was at first regarded as an anachronism, a medieval remnant” (Tatarkiewicz 1973, 220). In this regard, people usually refer to the topic of intentionality. Unfortunately, this belief is rather misleading, because Brentano (a) spoke of ‘intentional reference’ and not of ‘intentionality,’ and (b) his theory of intentional reference is rather different from the scholastic theory of intentionality (De Boer 1978).

In his History of Nineteenth Century Philosophy, Tatarkiewicz also points out that “his (=Brentano’s) whole manner of thinking was a novelty for his contemporaries, even when he only returned to old views” (Tatarkiewicz 1973, 211), and that “Brentano accomplished something exceptional for the philosophy of the nineteeth century: he avoided a minimalistic limitation without falling into speculative metaphysics” (Tatarkiewicz 1973, 220).

To this first set of eight reasons (which I will label of an internal nature) I will now add a second set of reasons (labelled of an external nature). I call ‘internal’ the former set because it concerns Brentano’s way of doing philosophy, while I call ‘external’ the latter set because it has to do with reasons of a roughly historical nature.

1. A number of Brentano’s outstanding pupils achieved their own success and founded their own schools. Suffice it to mention Husserl’s phenomenology, Twardowski’s Lvov-Warsaw school and Meinong’s Graz school. The personal success and academic recognition attained by these exponents of Brentano’s school (in the broad sense) have come to obscure their common thematic origins (Simons 1992, Coniglione, Poli and Wolenski 1993, Smith 1994, Albertazzi, Libardi and Poli 1996a, Poli 1997).

This aspect is further emphasised by the classification of Brentano as the precursor of phenomenology, thereby relegating his thought to a minor and complementary role (Tatarkiewicz 1973; Spiegelberg 1984, 27). One of the very few authors not to have committed this error is Wolfgang Stegmüller, whose work on the currents of contemporary philosophy correctly considers Brentano to be an independent thinker and characterizes his philosophy as the philosophy of evidence (Stegmüller 1978).

2. It is nowadays quite well known that at the beginning of this century, the roots of analytic and phenomenological philosophies occupied the same cultural territory. Although it may seem a somewhat crude overgeneralization, at least on the ‘analytic’ side, that Brentano was one of the founders of the analytic movement and in particular of the Vienna Circle, was explicitly stated in the Vienna Circle’s manifesto. The section devoted to the historical background of the circle declared:

The commitment of physicists like Mach and Boltzmann to the teaching of philosophy testifies to the then dominant interest in the logical and gnoseological problems of the foundation of physics. From this fundamental theme also arose the requirement to renew logic; and it was at Vienna, although he moved from an entirely different direction, that Franz Brentano had opened the way. As a Catholic priest, Brentano was well-versed in scholastic philosophy, and he undoubtedly took from it its logical doctrines together with Leibnizian contributions for a reform of logic, while he left aside Kant and the systematic idealist philosophers. The appreciation by Brentano and his pupils of the work of scholars like Bolzano and others who sought to give a rigorous foundation to logic became more and more apparent. Alois Höfler stressed this aspect of Brentanian philosophy before a public which comprised, because of the influence of Mach and Boltzmann, numerous adherents of a scientific conception of the world. The philosophical society directed by Höfler held frequent meetings on the gnoseological and logical aspects of the foundation of physics at the University of Vienna… During roughly the same period (1870–1882), at work within Brentano’s Viennese group was Alexius von Meinong (subsequently professor at Graz), whose Gegenstandstheorie had a certain affinity with the modern theory of concepts and whose pupil Ernst Mally likewise conducted research in the field of the logistic (The Vienna Manifesto, “Historical background” (my translation)).

This long quotation is of particular interest, for a number of reasons. In fact as soon as one discovers that Meinong had been Brentano’s pupil and that Höfler and Mally had in turn been Meinong’s, one realizes that many of the names cited above belonged to what was in many respects a unitary research group.

For this reason I may claim that the subsequent split between analytic philosophy and phenomenology contributed to generate, as a side-effect, the oblivion into which Franz Brentano’s thought then fell.

3. “It is fair to say the Brentano tradition effectively died with the First World War. This was simply because the first two generations lost most of their members. Brentano died in 1917, Marty in 1914, Meinong in 1920” (Simons 1992, 156).

4. It may also be pointed out that with the disintegration of the political and geographical unity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and especially with the events that hastened its final collapse, also the sense of unity of this philosophical and scientific tradition was lost. After 1918, the centres of this tradition — principally Vienna, Prague and Lvov — belonged to different states, and the prolific network of exchanges, contacts and relationships which was one of the reasons for the cultural richness of the period, was dismantled. However, each individual component still preserved something of the philosophical style of its master, a set of features which today permit us to talk of ‘Central European philosophy’ or, in Melandri’s apt expression, of ‘Central-East-European philosophy.’

All these reasons are correct and historically verifiable. I am nevertheless convinced that they do not tell the whole truth. To my mind, there is still something missing. Understanding of this missing component of the explanation requires resorting to a third set of reasons. It seems to me that this third set of reasons has to do with Brentano’s idea of science.

It is well known that Brentano claimed that “the genuine method of philosophy is none other than that of natural science” (Brentano 1968). The thesis is clear. On the footing of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Brentano says that philosophy is a science. This is clea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 The Brentano Puzzle: An Introduction
• 2 Who Needs Brentano? The Wasteland of Philosophy without its Past
• 3 Introduction to Paul Linke’s ‘Gottlob Frege as Philosopher’
• 4 Gottlob Frege as Philosopher
• 5 Franz Brentano and the University of Vienna Philosophical Society 1888–1938
• 6 On Agents and Objects: Some Remarks on Brentanian Perception
• 7 Perceptual Saliences and Nuclei of Meaning
• 8 Brentano and the Thinkable
• 9 From Empirical Psychology to Phenomenology. Edmund Husserl on the ‘Brentano Puzzle’
• 10 Brentano and Boltzmann: The Schubladenexperiment
• 11 Johannes Daubert’s Theory of Judgement
• 12 On Alexius Meinong’s Theory of Signs
• 13 Linguistic Expressions and Acts of Meaning: Comments on Marty’s Philosophy of Language