The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School

Uriah Kriegel, Uriah Kriegel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317690542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano (1838–1917) had an often underappreciated influence on the course of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy. The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School offers full coverage of Brentano's philosophy and his influence. It contains 38 brand-new essays from an international team of experts that offer a comprehensive view of Brentano's central research areas—philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and value theory—as well as of the principal figures shaped by Brentano's school of thought. A general introduction serves as an overview of Brentano and the contents of the volume, and three separate bibliographies point students and researchers on to further avenues of inquiry.

Systematic and detailed, The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School provides readers with a valuable reference to Brentano's work and to his lasting importance in the history of philosophy and in contemporary debates.

I

Brentano’s Philosophy

1

Franz Brentano: Life and Work

Thomas Binder

“Descending from a devout Catholic family I was led to dedicate myself to the priesthood; but later on I broke up with the Church. Only the desire to serve the noblest interests had directed me in the choice of a profession. But the subsequent transformation of my convictions made me realize that the path pursued so far could not possibly lead to its destination” (Brentano 1922: xv). This might be—in his own words—the shortest version of a biography of Franz Brentano, but it undoubtedly hits the central point: Brentano’s changing and problematic relationship to Catholicism and to religious faith in general overshadowed his entire career. A more detailed approach to his biography will improve our understanding of this fact.¹

Franz Brentano was born on January 16, 1838, in Marienberg near Boppard on the Rhine, but shortly afterwards the family moved to Aschaffenburg, where Franz was raised. The roots of the Brentano family were in Italy, at the shores of Lake Como. Brentano’s closer family circle was part of the so-called Frankfurt branch, which produced successful merchants as well as famous intellectuals (Brentano’s uncle and aunt, Clemens Brentano and Bettina von Armin, were two of the most important representatives of German Romanticism; his younger brother, Lujo, became a famous economist and was one of the Kathedersozialisten). Brentano’s father, Christian (1784–1851), was a businessman and author and his mother, Emilie (1810–1882), a tutor and translator of devotional literature; both parents were strongly engaged in the Catholic movement. As Alfred Kastil (see Chapter 36) wrote later with a dramatic touch, Brentano grew up under the spell of the Catholic worldview.

After private schooling and one year in the Lyceum at Aschaffenburg, Brentano studied philosophy, mathematics, history, and theology in Munich, Würzburg, Berlin, and Münster. His most influential philosophical teachers were Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg in Berlin, who was a leading Aristotle expert; and Franz Clemens in Münster, a fervid representative of Neothomism. In 1862, Brentano submitted his doctoral dissertation On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle at the University of Tübingen (Brentano 1862). Almost at the same time, Brentano finally decided to become a priest. However, the above cited formulation “I was led to dedicate myself to priesthood” supports the conclusion that his mother and her spiritual advisers were involved in this decision. Many years later, moreover, Brentano told Oskar Kraus (see Chapter 36) that religious doubts had dated back to his early university years. But for the time being, Brentano managed to silence his scruples and joined the Catholic seminary at Würzburg. On August 8, 1864, Brentano was ordained a Catholic priest by Bishop Stahl of Würzburg.

Remarkably enough, after ordination, the bishop permitted Brentano to resume philosophical studies. As a result, Brentano presented his Habilitationsschrift on The Psychology of Aristotle to the University of Würzburg (Brentano 1867). Brentano’s public “apology” of his 25 Habilitation Theses (among them the famous fourth thesis that the method of philosophy is none other than that of natural science) on July 7, 1866, was such an overwhelming success that the young Carl Stumpf decided spontaneously to give up law studies and to study philosophy instead (see Chapter 28).

Brentano’s accomplishments in the following years were amazing: in 1867, he started with a lecture course on history of philosophy, and a year later he had a course on metaphysics, adding lectures on logic and psychology from 1871 onward. Although Brentano was very popular with the students, he still was only a “private lecturer” (Privatdozent).² An application for the post of an “extraordinary professor” in 1870 was rejected by the faculty because its more liberal members had reservations regarding a Catholic priest dominating the chair of philosophy (the only holder of the chair, Franz Hofmann, a student of Franz von Baader, was no longer actively teaching due to health problems, which did not prevent him from plotting against Brentano).

At that time, Brentano was still a Catholic priest on the surface, but almost nobody knew that his views had already changed dramatically. First, his philosophical views changed. Supposedly in 1868 he read the French translation of John Stuart Mill’s monograph on Auguste Comte’s positivist philosophy. Brentano was so impressed with Mill’s outline that he gave a lecture course on Comte in the following year and published an article in which he himself confessed to “positive philosophy.” (In addition, this article is of special interest because it shows the first signs of Brentano’s distancing from Aristotle.) It may well be that the preoccupation with the antidogmatism of French and British Empiricism had consequences for one the most crucial episodes in his life.

In 1869, Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler engaged Brentano to write a memorandum against the dogma of papal infallibility (which was promulgated in the following year at the first Vatican Council of July 1870). It is little known that Brentano wrote two memoranda. The first argued only against the appropriateness of declaring papal infallibility. Because it failed, Brentano wrote a second one, this time attacking several dogmas of the Catholic Church directly and demonstrating their inconsistency (see Freudenberger 1979 for a detailed description). Stumpf witnessed Brentano’s definite break with religious faith at Easter 1870, describing it as a painful struggle. There is a certain irony in the fact that Brentano eventually became extraordinary professor of philosophy in Würzburg in May 1872 (primarily due to the intervention of Hermann Lotze), when Brentano was no longer able to give the appearance of being a ultramontanist Catholic priest: in March 1873, he resigned from his professorship, and in April he withdrew from the priesthood.³

Brentano’s position after the resignation was quite difficult because most of the universities in Protestant Germany were barred for him. A conversion to Protestantism (as his brother Lujo suggested) was not an option for Brentano. He (unsuccessfully) applied for a post in Giessen, but it was the University of Vienna that raised his hopes: in the capital of the Habsburg monarchy, a chair of philosophy had turned vacant (its former holder was the Herbartian Franz Karl Lott) and therefore the faculty was looking for a philosopher especially qualified in psychology. Brentano postponed other projects and began immediately to work on what should eventually become his philosophical masterpiece: the Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Old family connections to Vienna, an emphatic recommendation by Lotze, and Karl von Stremayr, the liberal minister of cultural affairs, made it possible to overcome the influence of the Catholic clergy and the doubts of the deeply religious Emperor Franz Josef I: on January 18, 1874, Brentano was finally appointed full (“ordinary”) professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna.⁴ In April, he gave his acclaimed inaugural lecture on Die Gründe der Entmutigung auf philosophischem Gebiete. In May, the first volume of his Psychology was published. In the preface, Brentano announced a second volume, which he never delivered for reasons still discussed controversially today.⁵

In Vienna, Brentano continued his successful teaching career. The number of his students was increasing steadily, not least because of the lecture course on ethics he had to give for the law students (a topic that Brentano had not yet addressed in Würzburg). Among his early students in Vienna were such remarkable personalities as Thomas G. Masaryk (later president of Czechoslovakia), Alexius Meinong (see Chapter 29), and Sigmund Freud (see Merlan 1945). In his early Viennese years, Brentano was successful not only in university matters but also in the refined society of Vienna’s bourgeoisie, especially in their Jewish circles; he was in fashion, as he puts it himself in a letter to Marty. Nevertheless, most of these social relationships did not satisfy his demands for friendship.

Sometime around 1878, Brentano decided to delete the last remaining marks of priesthood and to get married. In September 1880 (shortly before he had left the Church officially), he married Ida von Lieben, the sister of Richard von Lieben, an economist and a colleague of Brentano’s at the University of Vienna. At that point, though, Brentano was no longer member of the faculty. This was due to the fact that, concerning former priests in the conservative Habsburg monarchy, the Civil Code adopts the regulations of Church law—and Church law denied marriage to all ordained priests, even if they have resigned from the priesthood (priesthood is a character indelebilis, which means that under no circumstances it can be canceled). So Brentano had been forced to renounce his Austrian citizenship in order to marry and turned Saxon instead, which automatically resulted in the loss of his full professorship. Only a few days later, he returned to Vienna and resumed his lectures as a Privatdozent. This new status was hardly appropriate for Brentano, as he was not entitled to supervise any doctoral theses or to participate in hiring decisions. With the unanimous support of the faculty members, Brentano tried several times to regain his former position but in vain; times had changed and turned more conservative than in his first Viennese years.

Between 1874 and 1894, Brentano was very reluctant to publish his thoughts. There was no major publication, only a small number of short lectures on various topics (aesthetics, ethics, historiography) resulting from occasional events. It should be mentioned nevertheless that even among these writings one can find a classic: In The Origin of the Knowledge of Right and Wrong Brentano presented for the first time what he thought was a totally new foundation of ethics and value theory (See Chapter 20); it was also his first book to be translated into English, in 1902. Also as a private lecturer Brentano was still extraordinarily successful. In a letter to Hermann Schell, he mentioned proudly that he had more students than Robert Zimmermann, a Herbartian who held the only chair of philosophy in Vienna at this time. And Brentano’s students obviously were more gifted: Edmund Husserl, Kazimirz Twardowski, Alois Höfler, and Christian von Ehrenfels (among others) joined the ranks of what nowadays is well known as the “Brentano School” (see Chapter 25). There is another aspect of Brentano’s teaching that is noteworthy. Brentano was not only a charismatic teacher, he was also strongly interested in personal contact with his students; Stumpf (1919) tells of long philosophical strolls in Würzburg, and in Vienna, Brentano often invited his students to his apartment to continue the discussions that had started during his lectures and seminars. It is highly probable that the Philosophical Society at the University of Vienna initially emerged from these private discussions; the society was founded in 1888 and Brentano gave the inaugural a...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Halftitle
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: BRENTANO’S PHILOSOPHY
• PART II: THE BRENTANO SCHOOL
• Notes on Contributors
• Brentano Bibliography
• Brentano Bibliography—Archival Material
• References
• Index