School of Brentano

In his entire oeuvre Brentano defended a scientific conception of philosophy and advocated the adoption of a rigorous, scientific method. Given this background it might come as a surprise that in his reflections on aesthetics he firmly rejected the classic definition of aesthetics as the science of beauty. This must not be read as an expression of disinterest in – or a dismissal of – aesthetics, though. It is rather an expression of Brentano's view concerning the position of aesthetics in his overall system. He conceived it – on a par with logic and ethics – not as a theoretical science, but as a practical discipline that was rooted in psychology: aesthetics, Brentano suggests, is not constituted by a set of intrinsically related propositions; it rather serves the practical purpose of instructing those who want to experience the beautiful with correct taste or to create works of art. The task of aesthetics is, in other words, to formulate a set of rules or instructions that teach us how to correctly experience beauty, how to come to prefer the more over the less beautiful, but also how to create beauty and how to produce works of art that have the power to bring about aesthetic pleasure in the beholder.

It is often claimed that Brentano’s rediscovery of intentionality has been strongly influenced by Aristotle. Brentano himself stressed repeatedly his affinity to Aristotle and this self-interpretation was by no means restricted to the theory of intentionality. In fact, Brentano seemed to believe that almost all of what he had discovered during his most influential years (1874–1895) has its more or less remote roots in the philosophy of Aristotle. Yet if we carefully compare the picture of intentionality that is to be found in Aristotle’s De Anima with Brentano’s theory of immanent objects, we find more differences than similarities. The truth is that Brentano developed a quite different ontology of intentionality, and his references to Aristotle should be seen as a conventional homage to his master rather than as something of substance that could help us to understand better Brentano’s own theory. What Brentano in fact took from Aristotle was rather his way of doing philosophy and certain isolated ideas, but certainly not theories in their entirety.

Although material value-ethics was introduced into philosophy at least a century ago, confusion still persists as to what it implies. This article offers some clarification. It states how material value-ethics stands opposed to formalistic ethics, commonly – though perhaps wrongly – attributed to Kant. The resulting analysis allows us to establish a combination of features that give material value-ethics an advantage over deontological, consequentialist and other perspectives, regardless of the hermeneutics issue.

Dass die deskriptive Psychologie zu den Entwicklungen aus Brentanos Wiener Periode gehört, ist eine weitverbreitete Meinung in der Rezeption des Aschaf- fenburger Philosophen. Mein Anliegen im folgenden Aufsatz ist es, diese An- sicht kritisch zu untersuchen. Anhand einer Neubewertung der relevanten Text- stellen aus der Psychologie von 1874 und einer kritischen Untersuchung der spä- teren Quellen und rückblickenden Bemerkungen einiger Schüler und Enkelschü- ler Brentanos möchte ich einige Belege für die These anbieten, dass Brentano über die Unterscheidung zwischen deskriptiver und genetischer Richtung der Psychologie schon als junger Professor in Würzburg verfügte.

Professeur de philosophie à l'Université Saint-Louis à Bruxelles et à l'Université du Luxembourg, où il enseignait la logique et la philosophie contemporaine de l'esprit et du langage, Robert Brisart est décédé le 25 février 2015.
Réunissant ses collègues et amis autour des thèmes philosophiques qui lui étaient chers et qui ont constitué le coeur de ses recherches, ces journées veulent lui rendre hommage.

How does it feel to be a worm? No doubt, it feels Kafkaesque. The metamorphosis (1915) is a story of an ordinary man, Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning as an ungeheures Ungeziefer or ‘giant vermin’. Is this only a bodily change, or has his mind been transformed as well? And how do the people around him cope with this transformation? In this paper, I am going to examine these issues by using tools from Franz Brentano’s (1838–1917) and Anton Marty’s (1847–1914) philosophy of mind and language. Rumour has it that Kafka’s stories were not only products of his own troubled soul, but were also profoundly influenced by the work of these two philosophers. In my paper, I will cover the following issues: the influence of Franz Brentano on Anton Marty and a fortiori on Franz Kafka (1883–1924), who was Marty’s student in Prague (and in this way, saying something about the School of Brentano); Brentano’s and Marty’s theory of correct and incorrect emotions, and its traces in Kafka’s The metamorphosis; Marty’s philosophy of language and communication as reflected in Kafka’s writings; and Brentano’s reism in comparison to Kafka’s nominalism, on the basis of Roberto Calasso’s interpretation of Kafka.

Franz Brentano's impact on the philosophy of his time and on 20th-century philosophy is considerable. The "sharp dialectician" (Freud) and "genial master" (Husserl) influenced philosophers of various allegiances, being acknowledged not only as the "grandfather of phenomenology" (Ryle) but also as an analytic philosopher "in the best sense of this term" (Chisholm). The fourteen new essays gathered together in this volume give an insight in three core issues of Brentano's philosophy: consciousness (sect.1), intentionality (sect. 2) and ontology and metaphysics (sect. 3). Two further sections of the volume deal with the posterity of his philosophy: in section 4, the legacy of his account of sense perception and feeling is discussed, while the history of Brentano's unpublished manuscripts is discussed in section 5. This section also presents an edition of a manuscript from 1899 on relations, along with the letters from Brentano to Marty which discuss this manuscript. The last part of section 5 contains the text of a public lecture given by Brentano on the laws of inference.

Phenomenology, Humanities and Sciences | Vol. 2 - 2 - 2021 | 308-309

Este pequeno ensaio foi ditado pelo Barão Ehrenfels, poucas semanas antes de sua morte, à sua esposa, quando lhe foi pedido que apresentasse nas palavras mais simples possíveis o sentido de sua teoria. Primeira publicação em: Philosophia (Belgrado), 2, 1937, pp. 139-141. Reimpressão em: Ferdinand Weinhandl (Org.), Gestalthaftes Sehen. Ergebnisse und Aufgaben der Morphologie. Zum Hundertjährigen Geburtstag von Christian von Ehrenfels. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978, pp. 61-63. Tradução em inglês: “On Gestalt Qualities (1932)”, em Barry Smith (Org.), Foundations of Gestalt Theory, München-Wien: Philosophia Verlag, 1988, pp. 121-123.

Our perception shows us a world containing sensory qualities such as colours, sounds, etc.: a sensible world. However, physics teaches us that the world is just a dark and silent heap of particles; colours, sounds, etc., are only derived “secondary” qualities, mere appearances arising from the action of the physical “primary” qualities on our senses. Hence the problem: Do colours, sounds, etc., exist independently of us, and if not, to what extent do their appearances provide us with an adequate knowledge of reality?
The problem of secondary qualities, which has occupied philosophers since the early modern era, found one of its most systematic treatments in the Austro-German tradition, more precisely in and around the School of Brentano (though it has gone largely unnoticed). Brentano and his followers, among them Husserl, Meinong, and their many students, made novel analyses of all aspects of the problem: they furnished detailed phenomenological descriptions of the content and object of sensation, which they took to be required for sound discussion of the metaphysical and epistemological aspects of the problem; they proposed various original metaphysical solutions to the question of whether sensory qualities exist; and they explored the different epistemological consequences of the metaphysical options at stake, in particular for the reliability of our perception.
This conference gathers both specialists in the Austro-German tradition and contemporary philosophers working on colours and other sensory qualities, with the aim of reconstructing the Austro-German debates on secondary qualities and undertaking an evaluation of the theoretical value of this material.

The development of phenomenology in nineteenth‐century German philosophy is that of a particular stream within the larger historical‐philosophical complex of Austro‐German philosophy. As the “grandfather of phenomenology” resp. the “disgusted grandfather of phenomenology,” but also as the key figure on the “Anglo‐Austrian Analytic Axis”, Brentano is at the source of the two main philosophical traditions in twentieth‐century philosophy. This chapter focuses mainly on his place in nineteenth‐century European philosophy and on the central themes and concepts in his philosophy that were determinant in the development of the philosophy of his most gifted student: Edmund Husserl. Despite the variety of stances which Brentano expressed on ontology, metaphysics, and psychology over the course of his career, the five general principles remain central to his whole philosophy throughout: they have an important place in what could be called Brentano's philosophical worldview or system. By extension, they also are essential to his conception of phenomenology.

Full text (self-archived): http://www.kkphil.com/uploads/4/3/2/5/43250729/frechette-originsphenomenology2019-selfarchive.pdf

Table of contents:
§1. Historical Background. Brentano and 19th-century European philosophy
§1.1. Aristotle’s heir
§1.2. Brentano and his school
§1.3. Husserl
§2. Some General Principles of Brentano’s Philosophy
§2.1. Principle (a): Philosophy as a science
§2.2. Principle (b): Anti-Kantianism
§2.3. Principle (c): Empiricism
§2.4. Principle (d): The mereological nature of substance §2.5. Principle (e): The correctness principle
§3. The Phenomenology of Brentano and Husserl
§3.1. Phenomenology, Phenomena, and Experiences §3.2. Description and its tools
  i) exactness
  ii) examples
  iii) eidetic variations
§3.3. Intentionality
  i) the basic theory of intentionality
  ii) the enhanced theory
  iii) the reistic version
  iv) Husserl’s account of intentionality
§3.4. Consciousness
§3.5. Emotions and values
§3.6. Psychologism and anti-psychologism

In the following paper, I discuss the various accounts of time-consciousness developed by Brentano between 1867 and 1917, on the background of his metaphysical views. I propose a comprehensive picture of the different conceptions he defended which gets around the uneasy division of his works into early and ‘mature’ views, which has often been taken as a starting point for assessing the importance of reism at the expense of the rest of his works.

What is the logical form of judgments, if they have one? This question remains an enigma for any transcendental approach to logical thought. The paper addresses the matter by following the debate between Edmund Husserl and Christoph Sigwart from 1890 to 1904. It shows the pivotal role that the problem of judgment played in this discussion. Since judgments were thought to be both refined mental acts and fundamental logical elements, the related issue was a thumbnail version of the broader conflict between psychology and logic. The paper argues that Husserl, far from overcoming Sigwart's "Kantian-psychologistic" approach, ends up integrating it into the later stages of his phenomenological work; and that this approach does in fact pose an unavoidable transcendental-genetic problem for Husserl's phenomenology of logic. The argument intends to contribute to a possible integration of the study of the factual "nature" of men within the horizon of the philosophical logic of knowledge.

Brentano’s theory of continuity is based on his account of boundaries. The core idea of the theory is that boundaries and coincidences thereof belong to the essence of continua. Brentano is confident that he developed a full-fledged, boundary-based, theory of continuity ; and scholars often concur: whether or not they accept Brentano’s take on continua they consider it a clear contender. My impression, on the contrary, is that, although it is infused with invaluable insights, several aspects of Brentano’s account of continuity remain inchoate. To be clear, the theory of boundaries on which it relies, as well as the account of ontological dependence that Brentano develops alongside his theory of boundaries, constitute splendid achievements. However, the passage from the theory of boundaries to the account of continuity is rather sketchy. This paper pinpoints some chief problems raised by this transition, and proposes some solutions to them which, if not always faithful to the letter of Brentano’s account of continua, are I believe faithful to its spirit.
§1 presents Brentano’s critique of the mathematical account of the continuous. §2 introduces Brentano’s positive account of continua. §3 raises three worries about Brentano’s account of continuity. §4 proposes a Neo-Brentanian approach to continua that handles these worries.

Abstract: Brentano’s conception of scientific philosophy had a strong influence on his students and on the intellectual atmosphere of Vienna in the late nineteenth century. The aim of this article is to expose Brentano’s conception and to contrast his views with that of two traditions he is said to have considerably influenced: phenomenology and analytic philosophy. I will shed light on the question of how and to what extent Brentano’s conception of philosophy as a rigorous science has had an impact on these two traditions. The discussion will show that both took their liberties in the interpretation of the thesis, a move that allowed them to liberate themselves from Brentano’s inheritance and to fully develop their own philosophical positions.

The purpose of this paper is to stress the constancy of the Husserlian conception of sensible contents. I argue that Husserl, despite some significant changes in his philosophical views between 1901 and 1913, always maintained that sensations have a founding role to play in perceptual experience. The proposed interpretation is build against the idea of a scission in Husserl's work as regards the status of sensations—an idea which became widespread due to the so-called (neo-)Fregean readings of phenomenology. Even if the notion of sense (―Noema‖) gains in importance in the Ideas, I argue that this does not discredit the sensuous stuff when it comes to the constitution of perceptual objects.

INHALT:

1. DIE ANKLAGE GEGEN JOSEPH K. UNKENNTNIS DER NATÜRLICHEN SANKTION VON GESETZ UND SITTE

  a) Brentanos Auffassung vom Naturgesetz

  b) Natürliches Recht und menschliches Bedürfnis im »Protagoras«

2. RICHTIGE ENTSCHEIDUNG: BRENTANOS THEORIE DER ETHIK
    a. Der empirische Ursprung der Begriffe »gut« und »besser«: analoge Ableitung des Begriffes »wahr«
    b. Evidente und blinde Urteile: evidente und blinde Gefühle
    c. Tugend kann nicht gelehrt werden: der springende Punkt in K.s
Prozeβ
    d. Schuld und wirkliche Freisprechung sind logisch vereinbar
3. K.S FALL UNTER BERUFUNG: UNSCHULD KANN ERWORBEN WERDEN
4. K.S TÄUSCHUNG MIT BEZUG AUF SCHULD: DAS GLEICHNIS VOR DEM GESETZ

Whereas few members of the Austrian School of Economics claimed that their concept of economic value could be extended beyond their discipline, the philosophers of the Brentano School and their intellectual heirs thought of value in a more general way. An attempt at elaborating a unified theory of value must therefore start from the Brentanian view of value as an intentional mental act that has a component structure. By reconstructing the essential elements shared by both schools (and by other Austrian attempts at understanding value), a basis is defined for a general theory of value and thus for reembracing an intellectual enterprise that, in most circles, has long been abandoned.

W artykule tym zająć się chcę pewną, na pozór dość ekstrawagancką tezą Brentana. Chodzi o to, że chciał on traktować psychologię jako podstawę filozofii. Taki postulat trudno jest dziś wziąć poważnie. Wydaje się, że analizy psychologiczne są z jednej strony za mało ogólne, z drugiej zaś niewystarczająco „głębokie”, aby móc funkcjonować jako fundament badania filozoficznego. Okazuje się jednak, że przy bliższym przyjrzeniu się można znaleźć sens, w jakim to Brentanowskie dictum może być ciekawe i inspirujące. Jeśli chcielibyśmy jednak dziś zastosować te idee Brentana, to rozsądniej by było istotnie rozszerzyć pojęcie tego, co on sam chciał rozumieć jako psychologię.

Despite their virtual absence in the subsequent phenomenological tradition, Husserl himself held in high esteem the analyzes – often referred to as ‘Husserl’s mereology’ – he undertook in the Third Logical Investigation (Husserl 1913, p. XV). This appreciation was not only due to their quasi-rigorous, quasi-formal aspect. Actually, it relied primarily on their fruitfulness, that is, the multiplicity of their applications. In later works, they will extend from time-consciousness (Huang 2019) to genetic phenomenology (Van Eynde 1999), but they are in fact remarkably diverse as early as the Logical Investigations. The Third LI indeed directly enables Husserl to deal, in the framework of one, unified theory, with a range of problems, whose vastness has not been sufficiently emphasized in the literature. The aim of this paper is thus to identify and synthetize all the problems and debates here at stake, the richness of which testifies to the tremendous power of Husserl's mereology. Five such issues are exhibited: abstraction, moments of unity, formal ontology, pure grammar, and unity of consciousness. Particular emphasis is placed on the last of these issues, which has been rather overlooked in the literature, even though it unveils the essential dependence of phenomenology on mereology. In so doing, the paper also demonstrates that the whole Brentano’s school is involved, in one way or another, in the debates surrounding the Third Investigation. As a conclusion, a comparison between the function of mereology in Brentano and Husserl is offered.

In the following paper, I discuss Fisette’s reconstruction of Brentano’s view, according to which Brentano’s conception of consciousness and of its unity is based on the presupposition that consciousness has a bearer, i.e. the soul. First, I identify Fisette’s real target (sect.1) and challenge his conception of the mental agent as central to Brentano’s account (sect. 2 and 3). In section 4, I formulate some doubts about the sources used by Fisette, and, in section 5, I propose another reading of the relation between the unity of consciousness and the mental agent in the late Brentano.

Apuntes previos o recopilación de ideas de cara a un posible artículo sobre la teoría del bien en Franz Brentano, las posibilidades de la fenomenología para fundar una teoría del bien y su comparación con las posibilidades de la fundación ontológica del bien según la propuesta del tomismo intensivo.

The Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences announces:

International Conference "Horizons Beyond Borders. Traditions and
Perspectives of the Phenomenological Movement in Central and Eastern
Europe"

June 17–19, 2015, Budapest, Hungary

Plenary Speakers (all confirmed): Michael Gubser (James Madison
University), George Heffernan (Merrimack College), Marci Shore (Yale
University), Nicolas de Warren (KU Leuven)

Further Invited Speakers (all confirmed): Jakub Čapek (Prague), Istvan M.
Feher (Budapest), Ferenc Hörcher (Budapest), Maija Kūle (Riga), Ivan Landa
(Prague), Balazs M. Mezei (Budapest), Victor Molchanov (Moscow), Karel
Novotný (Prague), Csaba Olay (Budapest), Robin D. Rollinger (Prague) , Inga
Römer (Wuppertal), Wojciech Starzyński (Warsaw), Adam Takacs (Budapest),
Petr Urban (Prague), Mihaly Vajda (Budapest)

Sessions on "Roots," "Figures," "Beyond Borders," "Beyond Politics," "New
Phenomenology from CEE," as well as Plenary Lectures "In Memoriam Krzysztof
Michalski" and "László Tengelyi" Memorial Sessions.

The program contains 64 presentations by scholars with primary affiliations
in 30 cities of 16 countries.


Detailed program:
http://ceephenomenology2015.husserl.hu/downloads/Conference_Program.pdf

Poster: http://ceephenomenology2015.husserl.hu/downloads/Poster_Web.pdf

Venue Map, Travel Information etc.: http://ceephenomenology2015.husserl.hu


Scientific Advisory Board: Ivan Blecha (Palacký University, Olomouc),
Cristian Ciocan (Institute for Philosophy “Alexandru Dragomir”, Bucharest),
Ion Copoeru (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca), Andrzej Gniazdowski
(Polish Academy of Sciences), Balazs M. Mezei (Pazmany Peter Catholic
University, Hungary), Karel Novotný (Faculty of Humanities, Charles
University of Prague / Academy of the Sciences of the Czech Republic),
Csaba Olay (ELTE University, Budapest), Wojciech Starzyński (Polish Academy
of Sciences), Jaroslava Vydrová (Slovak Academy of Sciences), Michal Zvarík
(Trnava University).

Chair of the Organizing Committee: Peter Andras Varga (Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences,).

Secretary of the Organizing Committee: Witold Płotka (University of Gdansk, Poland).

Director of Host Institute: Ferenc Hörcher.


The conference is free and open to everybody. No prior written registration
is required.

Is phenomenology nothing else than descriptive psychology? In the first edition of his Logical Investigations (LI), Husserl conceived of phenomenology as a description and analysis of the experiences of knowledge, unequivocally stating that “phenomenology is descriptive psychology.” Most interestingly, although the first edition of the LI was the reference par excellence in phenomenology for the Munich phenomenologists, they remained suspicious of this characterisation of phenomenology. The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the reception of descriptive psychology among Munich phenomenologists and, at the same time, to offer a re-evaluation of their understanding of realist phenomenology.

Brentano's position in the history of philosophy is often illustrated by the long list of important philosophers who have studied with him. Yet, the relations between Brentano and his students were not always without friction. In the present article I argue that Brentano's students were most attracted by his conception of a scientific philosophy, which promised to leave the received tradition (German Idealism) behind and to mark the beginning of a new period in the history of philosophy-a project they were happy to be part of. Brentano's work remained in an important sense fragmentary, however, and could, thus, not provide the inner unity that would have been essential for forming a compact school or a unified philosophical movement.

In line with a rich and long tradition revived by Suárez, Brentano considers that all non-determined entities have to be considered as non-beings. In this respect, he makes use of the concept of “entia rationis.” Interestingly, he suggests, at least since his 1901 letter to Marty, that those entities have to be considered as no things or no beings at all but as “fictions” and more precisely as “linguistic fictions.” The purpose of my text is twofold. First, I intend to clarify the status of “linguistic fictions” in Brentano. In particular, I will enquire the extent to which they are connected or disconnected from the medieval considerations on “entia irrealia” and “entia rationis” (Suárez). Secondly, I will emphasize the linguistic nature of those fictions and, consequently, sketch some remarks on Brentano’s view on language and concepts.

In Marty’s writings one can find two theories of truth making. The first one is deeply rooted in Brentano’s picture of intentionality as put forward in his unpublished lectures and operates with both immanent and transcendent propositional entities. Marty’s second theory was formulated under the influence of Brentano’s late criticism of his own theory of immanent objects. It rejects all immanent entities, but differs significantly from Brentano’s late, “reist” position. I begin this paper with few words about the general idea of truth making. Then, in section 2, I sketch Brentano’s official theory of intentionality and describe a simple theory of truth-making that can be based on it. Section 3 contains an analysis of Marty’s first theory, employing the ontology of intentionality from Brentano’s unpublished lectures, and section 4 concerns Marty’s late theory, in which he rejected all immanent entities, but retained a rich ontology of external states of affairs.

In the famous Appendix to paragraphs 11 and 20 of his 5th Logical Investigation, Husserl criticizes the concept of ‘immanent object’ defended by Brentano and his pupils. Husserl holds that intentional objects, even non-existent ones, are ‘transcendent’. Yet long before Husserl’s criticism, Brentano and his pupils, in their theories of intentionality, besides ‘immanent’ objects also took into account transcendent ones, in a similar way to Husserl, since such transcendent objects were not necessarily objects that exist. The ‘immanent object’ (immanenter Gegenstand) was also called ‘presented-thing as presented’ (Vorgestelltes als Vorgestelltes), whereas the ‘transcendent object’ was called ‘object tout court’ (Gegenstand schlechtweg) or ‘presented-thing tout court’ (Vorgestelltes schlechtweg). Even if it is in Marty that one finds the clearest distinction between these two kinds of objects, other pupils of Brentano, and Brentano himself, made similar distinctions. But despite its importance, this point has been neglected in the Brentanian literature. In the first part of this article, I present the way in which immanent and transcendent objects have been distinguished in the School of Brentano. In the second part of the article, I present some problems linked to the distinction of two objects for every mental act, an immanent and a transcendent one; these problems could explain the abandonment of the notion of ‘immanent object’ by many philosophers of the Brentanian tradition. I conclude with some remarks on the distinction between content and object in the School of Brentano.

Descriptive psychology had a tremendous influence on Brentano’s students and was soon to be identified by early 20th-century psychologists like Bühler as the most important contribution to psychology of the School of Brentano. In the following paper, I am interested in the reception of the methodology of descriptive psychology, and more precisely in the third step of descriptive analysis, namely interpretation (Deutung). I suggest that the meaning of interpretation as a descriptive category undergoes important changes from Brentano to Bühler. First, I show that Brentano’s understanding of interpretation relies much on the writings of 19th-century British philosophers like Mill, Bain and Whewell. Following Mill, Brentano sees interpretation as a constitutive part of the description. According to him, this step of the analysis corresponds to the second class of mental phenomena: judgments. Second, I show how Marty integrated Brentano’s basic theory of interpretation in his theory of meaning, especially concerning the distinction between intended and non-intended manifestation (Kundgabe). Finally, I argue that this conception of the role and nature of interpretation in descriptive psychology was one of the reasons why Bühler rejected Marty’s conception of manifestation.

In diesem Aufsatz besprechen wir die Ontologie der Sachverhalte, die Carl Stumpf vorgeschlagen hat. Wie viele Vertreter der Brentano-Schule stützt sich hier Stumpf auf die reiche Ontologie der intentionalen Beziehung, die Brentano in seinen Vorlesungen aus der so genannten „mittleren“ Periode vorgeschlagen hat. Stumpf modifiziert jedoch die übernommene Lehre in einer unerwarteten Weise. Brentano sprach nämlich sowohl von immanenten als auch transzendenten propositionalen Entitäten. Stumpf hingegen führt nur die immanenten, aber keine transzendenten Sachverhalte ein, was alle potentiellen Vorteile einer derartigen Erweiterung der Ontologie zunichte zu machen scheint. Wir zeigen jedoch, dass sich die Position Stumpfs erklären lässt, wenn man zwei wichtige Punkte beachtet. Zum einen sind die Brentanoschen Objekte (der nominalen Form) bereits höchst komplizierte Entitäten, die in vielen Aspekten Sachverhalte ersetzen können. Zum anderen verwendet hier Stumpf, wie es scheint, einen konzeptualistischen Erklärungsmuster, den man auch bei dem frühen Brentano oft findet.

This paper defends hedonic intentionalism, the view that all pleasures, including bodily pleasures, are directed towards objects distinct from themselves. Brentano is the leading proponent of this view. My goal here is to disentangle his significant proposals from the more disputable ones so as to arrive at a hopefully promising version of hedonic intentionalism. I mainly focus on bodily pleasures, which constitute the main troublemakers for hedonic intentionalism. Section 1 introduces the problem raised by bodily pleasures for hedonic intentionalism and some of the main reactions to it. Sections 2 and 3 rebut two main approaches equating bodily pleasures with non- intentional episodes. More precisely, section 2 argues that bodily pleasures cannot be purely non-intentional self-conscious feelings, by relying on Brentano’s objection to Hamilton’s theory of pleasure. Section 3 argues that bodily pleasures cannot be non-intentional sensory qualities by relying on Brentano’s objections to Stumpf’s theory of pleasure. Section 4 develops a brentanian view of the intentionality of bodily pleasures by claiming bodily pleasures are directed at a sui generis class of sensory qualities. Section 5 presents an objection to Brentano’s later theory of pleasure according to which all sensory pleasures are directed at sensing acts.

How do we individuate the senses, what exactly do we do when we do so, and why does it matter? In the following paper, I propose a general answer to these related questions based on Franz Brentano's views on the senses. After a short survey of various answers offered in the recent literature on the senses, I distinguish between two major ways of answering this question, causally and descriptively, arguing that only answers giving priority to description and to the classification involved in it are on the right track for a general answer to the related questions. In the second part of the paper, I argue that Brentano's descriptive psychology is an attractive candidate for such an answer. His descriptive psychology provides a plausible account of the classification involved in description, in particular regarding the classification of sensory qualities. I close the paper by briefly explaining how Brentano spells out the priority of descriptive answers over causal ones.

This paper accomplishes two tasks. First, I unpack Husserl's analysis of interest from his 1893 manuscript, "Notes Towards a Theory of Attention and Interest" to demonstrate that it comprises his first rigorous genetic analysis of attention. Specifically, I explore Husserl's observations about how attentive interest is passively guided by affections, moods, habits, and cognitive tensions. In doing so, I reveal that the early Husserl described attention as always pulled forward to new discoveries via the rhythmic recurrence of tension and pleasure. Second, I demonstrate that "Notes" is the germ of Husserl's mature genetic phenomenology of attention. The 1893 analysis provides Husserl with all of the philosophical reasons and tools for the construction of his genetic account of attention in his late works. I then discuss how the disclosure of this novel subterranean link can prompt a rethinking of the development of phenomenology.

One of the classical insights of Brentano's philosophy of intentional states is that there is a close relationship between intentionality and consciousness of mental states. As a consequence, this means that the consciousness of emotions involves an immediate presentation of the presentation in which the 'affective' mind is directed toward some object. Somehow differently, contemporary philosophical and psychological emotion theories are more interested in the experiential criterion of emotions, and, assuming that they acknowledge the intentionality criterion, the relation between conscious phenomenality and intentionality, in this case, is conceived of as an extrinsic relation. In this article, I propose an examination of Brentano's theory of affective states, and a short analysis of his criticisms against Hamilton's phenomenal view of affective states, in order to show that the Brentanian approach of the connexion between intentionality and consciousness could reveal difficulties and prejudices that contemporary emotions theories have to face.