This collection of fourteen original essays is devoted to Franz Brentano’s pathbreaking thoughts on language. Its main objectives are to reconstruct the latter, explore their dissemination in the Brentano School and the Brentanian tradition at large, and throw light on how they anticipated some important advances in the analytic philosophy of twentieth and early twenty first centuries. One of the chief things we do in this introductory chapter, besides clarifying those three objectives, is to spell out the basic assumption, arguably shared by Brentano and all the Brentanians, that a philosophical analysis of meaning is inseparable from considerations about what goes on in the mind and what there is in the world. What this means should become clear in the course of this introduction. Our plan is as follows. Section 1 offers some preliminary thoughts about the ‘invisibility’ of Brentano’s philosophy of language in contemporary literature, while Sects. 2, 3, 4 present the three aforementioned objectives in somewhat greater detail, thereby setting the framework for the rest of the book. Eventually, Section 5 gives a brief overview of the content of the chapters.
1 The Invisibility of Brentano’s Philosophy of Language
Franz Brentano taught philosophy for almost seven years at the University of Würzburg (1866–1873) and for twenty years at the University of Vienna (1874–1894). He is usually considered the leading figure of Austro-German philosophy. His philosophical views were motivated by his large-scale project of renewing philosophy on the basis of thoroughgoing investigations into mental phenomena. They have known a spectacular dissemination through several generations of students in Austria and beyond.
Given the breadth of Brentano’s intellectual progeny, the so-called Brentano School may be seen as the starting point of a more encompassing Brentanian tradition. The former comprises Brentano and his first outstanding students, among whom were Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Alexius Meinong, Kazimierz Twardowski and the early Edmund Husserl (see Albertazzi et al. 1996; Kriegel 2017a). The question of whether they all shared a fairly unified conception of what philosophy is, or should rather be seen as a heterogeneous group of scholars working on similar topics in a similar way, is still a subject of debate (see Dewalque 2017; Huemer 2019). The situation is all the more complicated that most of them founded in turn their own school: Husserl’s Logical Investigations gave rise to the realistic phenomenological movement (Ingarden , Pfänder, Stein, Scheler, Reinach, Von Hildebrand), Meinong founded the Graz School of object theory (Ameseder , Benussi, Höfler, Mally, Vitasek, Martinak), Twardowski laid the foundations of the Lvov-Warsaw School of Polish philosophy (Łukasiewicz , Leśniewski, Kotarbiński, Ajdukiewicz, Dąmbska, Tarski), and Marty is rightly considered the father of the Prague School of Brentanian orthodoxy (Kraus , Kastil, Katkov). However, it is probably not unfair to say that all those schools exhibit some family likeness and to this extent may be regarded as part and parcel of the Brentanian tradition.1
Representatives of the Brentano School and the Brentanian tradition are best known for having offered significant and enduring contributions to three major research areas, namely philosophy of mind, metaphysics and value theory. By contrast, comparatively little is known about their contribution to philosophy of language, which is rarely, if ever, mentioned in studies dedicated to Brentano’s legacy (see , however, Benoist 2003; Schuhmann 2004, 289–293). For example, Mark Textor, in his introduction to The Austrian Contribution to Analytic Philosophy, makes a quick list of Brentanian themes developed by Brentano’s pupils and mentions only the ontology of parts, the epistemology of perception and memory, and the theory of values (Textor 2006, 6–10). Similarly, the excellent collection of essays gathered in (Fisette and Fréchette 2013) does not contain a single chapter devoted to Brentano’s analysis of language, no more than (Kriegel 2017a). Generally speaking, the Brentanian philosophy of language has remained something of a blind spot in the Brentano studies.
As we shall see momentarily, this situation is not surprising. In fact, there is a good reason why Brentano’s philosophy of language remained largely ‘invisible’ so far in the literature.2 Before saying more on that, one notable exception must nonetheless be mentioned, namely the theory of language of Anton Marty, who is usually described as Brentano’s ‘Minister for Linguistic Affairs’ and whose outstanding contribution in this field is now well recognised (see Mulligan 1990; Fréchette and Taieb 2017, part 3; Leblanc and Bacigalupo 2019, part 1). Importantly, Marty’s influential Investigations into the Foundation of General Grammar and the Philosophy of Language (Marty 1908) paved the way to Karl Bühler’s Theory of Language (Bühler 1934, 2011; see also 2012; Cesalli and Friedrich 2014). And yet, the sheer importance of Marty’s and Bühler’s contributions should not conceal the fact that further representatives of the Brentano School also offered original analyses of language. This is certainly true of Marty’s master, Brentano himself, whose own thoughts about language are scattered across various unpublished course notes and have been sadly neglected so far (with only a few exceptions, see Srzednicki 1966; Albertazzi 1989; Rollinger 2009, 2014). But a similar observation also holds for further representatives of the Brentano School, like Meinong and Twardowski, or of the wider Brentanian tradition, like Martinak (1901), Mauthner (1901–1902, 1906) or—later —Ingarden (1965). The essays gathered in this volume aim at filling this gap, at least in part, by providing the reader with a more thorough understanding of the Brentanian approach to language, sign and meaning.
At this point an objector might protest, with good reason, that there is something puzzling in talking about ‘philosophy of language’ in the Brentano School and the Brentanian tradition. If indeed philosophy of language is understood as a specific area of philosophical inquiry distinct from philosophy of mind and metaphysics—a view which arguably became customary at some point in the post Frege-Russell analytic tradition—then certainly Brentano and his followers did not elaborate a fully fledged philosophy of language. As we said, Brentano’s big project was to renew philosophy on the basis of psychological investigations. Yet, by ‘philosophy’ he only meant metaphysics supplemented with (what he took to be) the three ‘practical’ branches of philosophy, namely logic, ethics and aesthetics. Obviously, there is no room in this metaphilosophical picture for philosophy of language understood as an autonomous area of investigation. This, alongside the fact that Brentano’s logic courses remained unpublished to date, explains why Brentano’s thoughts on language attracted so little attention in the literature.
However, as noted by (Cesalli and Mulligan 2017, 257), this does not mean that considerations on language were utterly absent from Brentano’s writings nor that the Brentanians did not have philosophically interesting views about meaning. In fact, what makes their thoughts about language interesting arguably is their shared conviction that a philosophical analysis of language—and, more pointedly, of what it is for signs and sounds to be endowed with meaning—cannot possibly be disconnected from a philosophical analysis of mind and reality, of what goes on in the mind and what there is in the world. Differently put, it is probably a tacit assumption made by Brentano and his followers that any serious philosophical investigation into meaning (linguistic or other) is to be seen as an integral part of a broader research programme in which mind, meaning and reality are to be integrated into a single coherent picture—or so we shall argue in this introductory chapter.
2 Brentano’s Approach to Language
The first objective of this book is to reconstruct Brentano’s thoughts on language. In this section we offer a preliminary overview of what makes his approach original (more is said about that in Part I of this book).
2.1 Behind the Words: Mental Phenomena
To grasp the distinctiveness of Brentano’s approach to language, it is helpful to make a very brief ...