The philosophy of Thomas Reid has exercised an enormous influence on Western thought from the publication of his Inquiry in 1764 until the present day. Reid's thought appeared on the world stage as at once amenable to science, Christian beliefs, the rise of a modern public sphere, and democratic politics. Exercising its most profound impact in postrevolutionary France and America, it promised to combine progress and stability by establishing links between common sense experience and philosophical and scientific thought in an era of rapid sociopolitical, religious, and scientific change. Reidian thought, moreover, had a significant impact on the development of higher education in both countries and was an important undercurrent in the broad expanse of nineteenth-century intellectual culture, an undercurrent that fed and mingled with other streams of Enlightenment thought. And although an identifiable school of “common sense philosophy” began to wane around the middle of the nineteenth century, Reid’s thought proved to be a multivalent and fertile influence on subsequent philosophical developments in Britain, France, and America such as positivism and pragmatism. Reid’s impact in German-speaking lands was slight but worth considering, since it has been claimed that his thought was highly influential there, and Kantianism became an important alternative – and at times bedfellow – to it.

Thomas Reid was a Christian philosopher. He never wavered from his theism or Christian belief, and a temperate, sincere faith pervades his writing and his biography. Apparently orthodox in belief, he wasn't given to theological and ecclesiastical controversies, but he did have a life-long interest in what we now call philosophy of religion issues. From 1751 to 1780 Reid's lectures included the subject of natural theology, or what can be known about God apart from revelation. Reid's notes for these lectures are almost entirely lost, but several student transcriptions from his lectures at Glasgow University (1763-1780) survive.2

Reid is a unique anti-medieval early modern theist, perhaps the last great Newtonian theist. An admirer of Samuel Clarke and Joseph Butler, he combines the rationalistic apologetics of the early eighteenth century with an antispeculative bent and a keen eye for human psychology. He doesn’t hesitate to employ the tools of philosophy in matters of religion. We shouldn’t, he says, be led by “zeal for religion” to defame reason in a rush to exalt revelation (EAP IV.xi: 636a). In this way Calvinism and Bayle, he saw, paved the way for Hume and other critics of religion.3 Although he continually emphasizes the limits of human understanding, Reid insists that “Revelation was not intended to supersede, but to aid the use of our natural faculties” (EAP V.ii: 641b).

If we look at Brentano's publications, we quickly see that they cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from the experimental psychology of visual perception, through specialized studies on Aristotle and the juridical intricacies of Austrian marital law, to extra-scientific pieces about chess and riddles. In view of this unusual situation, it seems clear that Brentano must have exerted his undoubted and far-reaching philosophical influence almost exclusively through his lecture courses. Through those courses he attracted many gifted students, and they constituted a school whose members came to hold important chairs not only in Austria, but also in Germany. Although these students, in their publications, often refer to Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint published in 1874, they do so for the simple reason that his lecture courses were (and remained) unpublished and could not be quoted directly, and this was therefore the only published work which they could cite.

MENTAL AND PHYSICAL PHENOMENA

In this chapter, I will set out what I take to be the basic tenets of Franz Brentano's epistemology. This seemingly simple task is a crucial one because virtually every other aspect of Brentano's philosophy uses his epistemology as a starting point and is structured in the same way. As the title of his major published work, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, suggests, Brentano saw himself as an empiricist; his account of knowledge, belief and other epistemological concepts is therefore constructed from the building blocks, so to speak, of the phenomena of experience.

According to Brentano, these phenomena are of two kinds, mental and physical, and he believes all human experience is experience of one or other of these phenomena. So we first have to see how he differentiates between mental and physical phenomena, between the mental and the physical. He lays out this distinction in the first chapter of Book 2 of his Psychology, entitled “On the Distinction Between Mental and Physical Phenomena.” Brentano first surveys several ways of laying out the distinction between these two classes of experiential phenomena. He then enumerates examples of mental and physical phenomena, and then tries to find the defining characteristics of mental phenomena. He identifies several characteristics which he thinks all mental phenomena have and all physical phenomena lack. Far and away the most important of these in his estimation, and the one which has aroused the most interest on the part of later philosophers, is what he calls “intentional inexistence.”

INTRODUCTION

Brentano's writings on the philosophy of mind or descriptive psychology have a number of distinctive features, all of which are connected with his understanding of what a part of theoretical philosophy is and ought to be, with his understanding of the relation between the philosophy of mind and experimental psychology, and with the success and thoroughness of his contribution to philosophy. First, his philosophy of mind always makes use of a carefully worked out ontological framework, indeed of at least two such frameworks. Secondly, he invariably argues at some length, sometimes at very great length, for his views. Thirdly, he often takes great pains to relate his views to those of the philosophical tradition, sometimes in order to argue against these views, sometimes in order to make clear just where he is building on the tradition and just where he is departing from it.

Brentano's theory of value, derived from his philosophical psychology, attempts to locate an objective basis for the intrinsic value of both aesthetic and ethical contemplation through the intentional objects of emotions and desires. As theories of intrinsic value, Brentano's aesthetics and ethics are concerned with what is good and bad, beautiful and ugly, pleasurable and displeasurable, in and of themselves, and not merely as a means to an end. As objective theories, Brentano presupposes that our aesthetic and ethical evaluations, like our judgments or beliefs, are either correct or incorrect. In what follows, we will set forth some of the basic principles involved in Brentano's aesthetics and ethics and elucidate how Brentano attempted to provide a foundation for these disciplines using his descriptive psychology.

INTRODUCTION

First of all I had to apprentice myself to a master. But since I was born when philosophy had fallen into most lamentable decay, I could find none better than old Aristotle. To understand him, which is not always easy, I enlisted the help of Thomas Aquinas.' (ANR, p. 291)

This is Brentano's recollection of his first steps in philosophy, written toward the end of his life. Earlier he had entered a passionate poem in a student's autograph album, portraying himself as brother of Aristotle's famous students, and as his offspring:

The derisive remark about the lamentable decay of philosophy was not aimed merely at philosophers active when he was a student, but at the German Idealist tradition from Kant to Hegel.

BACKGROUND AND ORIENTATION OF BRENTANO’S THOUGHT

Although Brentano broke with organized religion in the late 1870s, he remained a traditional theist all his life and was still writing (by dictation) on subjects in natural theology in 1917. His interests connected with this topic ranged from Darwin's theory of natural selection and Laplace's theory of probability to Comte's critique of causal knowledge and Cuvier's zoology. At every turn he showed himself to be conversant with scientific and philosophical developments of his day, as well as with relevant ancient and medieval philosophical speculations. Brentano's respect for the natural sciences and for the history of philosophy is nowhere more evident than in his discussions of the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. These themes were dear to his heart, and he championed the traditional view not only that they are accessible to philosophy but that their discussion constitutes philosophy's highest achievement.

INTRODUCTION

It is well known that Brentano classified “psychical phenomena” as presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate. Presentations are presentations of objects, although their objects may not exist. One might say roughly that presentations are the vehicles of content, but a presentation is not propositional in form and does not embody any stance of the subject toward the content in question. Judgments are affirmations or denials of presentations. Thus they are based on presentations but are not a species of them. It is of course judgments that are true or false. Phenomena of the third class are also based on presentations, and, like judgments, also embody a stance of the subject toward the content in question. Brentano sometimes characterizes this as Gefallen oder Missfallen, which might be rendered roughly as a pro- or con-attitude. Such attitudes can also be correct or incorrect, an idea that is the starting point of Brentano's ethics. However, phenomena of love and hate will play almost no role in what follows. The three-fold classification is presented in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint in 1874 and Brentano held to it for the remainder of his career.

THE INTENTIONALITY THESIS

Among Brentano's most important and philosophically influential achievements is his thesis of the intentionality of mind. To say that thought is intentional is to say that it intends or is about something, that it aims at or is directed upon an intended object. Intentionality is thus the aboutness of thought, the relation whereby a psychological state intends or refers to an intended object.

Brentano argues that all psychological phenomena and only psychological phenomena are intentional. He holds that to believe is to believe something; it is for a belief state, a particular kind of mental act, to intend or be about whatever is believed. The intended object of a belief is often a certain state of affairs, that today is Tuesday or that God exists, if the belief is that today is Tuesday or that God exists. The situation is the same with respect to other psychological states, such as desire, hope, fear, doubt, expectation, love, hate. To desire is to desire something, to be directed in thought to the object of desire, whatever the object may happen to be. In what is probably the most famous and undoubtedly most frequently quoted passage of his (1874) Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint), Brentano maintains:

BRENTANO’S SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

Brentano is among the most important yet under-appreciated philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He led an intellectual revolution that sought to reverse what was then the prevalent post-Kantian trend of German-Austrian philosophy in the direction of an Aristotelian scientific methodology. At the same time, he made valuable contributions to philosophical psychology, metaphysics, ontology, value theory, epistemology, the reform of syllogistic logic, philosophical theology and theodicy, and the history of philosophy and philosophical methodology.

By revitalizing Austrian scientific philosophy, Brentano and his school simultaneously laid the groundwork for twentieth-century philosophy of science as it came to fruition in the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, for the Gegenstandstheorie or object theory of Alexius Meinong and his students in the Graz School, and for phenomenology, notably in the work of Edmund Husserl, and indirectly in such later thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Beyond the borders of the German-speaking world, Brentano’s philosophy had a profound impact on the course of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, as evinced in tributes to his influence by, among many others, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Gilbert Ryle, G. F. Stout, and Roderick M. Chisholm.

CONCEPTUALISM (1862–1874)

It is often claimed that the beginnings of Brentano's ontology were Aristotelian in nature; but this claim is only partially true. Certainly the young Brentano adopted many elements of Aristotle's metaphysics, and he was deeply influenced by the Aristotelian way of doing philosophy. But he always interpreted Aristotle's ideas in his own fashion. He accepted them selectively, and he used them in the service of ends that would not have been welcomed by Aristotle himself. The present paper is an exposition of the development of Brentano's ontology, beginning with the Lectures on Metaphysics first delivered by Brentano in Würzburg in 1867 and concluding with his late work from 1904-17.

Being and truth

Aristotle distinguished various ways in which being can be predicated.1 There is first of all the ontologically serious use of the word “is”: being in the sense of the categories, also called “real being” in what follows. The two other ways of saying “is” relate respectively to what Aristotle called “purely accidental being” and “being in the sense of being true.” It is especially the notion of being in the sense of being true that will concern us in what follows.

BRENTANO’S RECOVERY OF THE INTENTIONAL

The topic of “intentionality” is a well-known quagmire. There seems to be no doubt that the Scholastic intentio had fallen into disuse in modern philosophy until it was recovered by Franz Brentano in an arresting way in the original edition (1874) of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. There, Brentano recovers intentionality - or, adhering to the text, “intentional inexistence” - as the essential nerve of an empirical psychology centered on describing the various kinds of “presentations [Vorstellungen] and other activities which are based upon presentations and which, like presentations, are only perceivable through inner perception.” These activities, Brentano says, belong to their “substantial bearer,” the soul (in Aristotle's sense of a certain “form of life” [physis, morphé], which Brentano follows), “the subject of consciousness” (as Oskar Kraus adds, without prejudging whether it is “spiritual or material” in being a “substantial substrate”).

INTRODUCTION

The nineteenth was logic's breakthrough century. At its beginning, logic had just been claimed by Kant, in justified ignorance of Leibniz's unpublished advances, not to have advanced since antiquity, and the laws of logic were soon to be submitted to the indignities of Hegel and to suffer the scorn of Mill. What started anachronistically in the 1820s with Richard Whately as a modest “back [beyond Locke] to Aristotle” movement in Oxford, trying to reinstate scholastic ways of doing logic after the long dark centuries since Ramus, inspired others lacking the desire to turn the clock back to reconsider logic and its role. This gathered momentum, and what began as a revival turned into a reform and then became a palace-storming revolution. Bolzano's obscurely published and tragically ignored 1837 masterpiece Wissenschaftslehre invented modern semantics, while ten years later in 1847 Boole and DeMorgan used mathematical methods and algebraic analogies to propel the study of inference out of the humanities and into mathematics.

INTRODUCTION

Though Brentano is a highly significant philosopher in his own right as well as the teacher of various outstanding philosophers, he is most widely known as the teacher of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. After Husserl had received his doctorate in mathematics in 1882, he made a career shift to philosophy in 1884 when he decided, under the influence of Thomas Masaryk, to attend lectures of Brentano in Vienna. He continued to do so until 1886, when Brentano recommended Husserl as a diligent student of philosophy to Carl Stumpf in Halle where Husserl was to join the staff in the following year. In the course of the 1890s, however, Husserl changed his philosophical orientation until he finally made his “breakthrough” to phenomenology with the Logical Investigations (1900/1). In later years, in spite of his repeated admissions of Brentano's profound influence on him, he only distanced himself more and more from Brentanian philosophy, while Brentano himself was rather dismayed with Husserl's innovations.