Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano had an often underappreciated influence on the course of 20 th - and 21 st -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. (shrink)

This paper is about the question: what is it for a mental state to mean (or present) something as an intentional object? This issue is addressed from a broad perspective, against the background of Brentano’s philosophical programme in Psychology from an empirical standpoint, and the controversy between the proponents of a non-canonical interpretation of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, and the so-called orthodox interpretation advocated namely by R. Chisholm. My investigation is divided into six parts. In the first section, I explain (...) the meaning and function of the notion of phenomenon in light of Brentano’s philosophical programme, and I briefly elucidate the notion of physical phenomenon which, in Brentano’s Psychology, constitutes the primary object of consciousness. In the next two sections, I look at two aspects of Brentano’s criticism of the identity thesis that he attributes to British empiricism, namely the psychological aspect, which concerns the identification of the two classes of phenomena, and the metaphysical aspect relating to the relationship between physical phenomena and the reality of an extramental world. Once this double distinction will be established, I will turn to the relation of intentional objects to presentations and put forward the hypothesis that intentional objects are conceptually dependent upon presentations and that this dependence rests, in turn, upon the content of the mental phenomena. The next step concerns Brentano’s theory of primary and secondary objects, and one of the main non-orthodox arguments against the canonical interpretation, namely that the latter conflates primary and secondary objects. In this context, I examine a second hypothesis: that the secondary object, or intentional correlate of an act, is an intentional content, which is distinct both from the intentional object and from the reality to which it relates, and I maintain that the intentional content has the function of mediating the mental acts’ relation to their objects. Finally, I shall examine some objections against the hypothesis of intentional content in Brentano’s Psychology, and I will conclude with a brief commentary on the bearing of this investigation with regard to the interpretation of the genesis of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, before and after the reistic turn of his philosophy. (shrink)

Cette étude porte sur l’évaluation par Carl Stumpf de la phénoménologie de Husserl dans ses Recherches logiques et dans le premier livre des Idées directrices. J’examine, dans un premier temps, la réception par Stumpf de la phénoménologie des Recherches logiques. Je me penche ensuite sur les §§ 85-86 des Idées directrices dans lesquels Husserl cherche à démarquer sa phénoménologie « pure » de la phénoménologie de Stumpf. Dans la troisième partie, j’examine la critique que Stumpf adresse, dans la §13 de (...) son ouvrage Erkenntnislehre, à la nouvelle version de la phénoménologie que Husserl élabore dans ses Idées directrices, et dans la quatrième, je me penche sur l’interprétation spinoziste des corrélations noético-noématiques dans ses deux études de Stumpf sur Spinoza. Je conclus en me demandant si la version de la phénoménologie que Husserl élabore durant la période de Freiburg n’anticipe pas, dans une certaine mesure, les critiques de Stumpf tout en confirmant le diagnostic de ce dernier sur la phénoménologie des Idées directrices. (shrink)

Brentano distinguishes between intentionality and reference. According to Brentano, all mental acts are intentionally directed toward something. Some mental acts also refer to something, which is the case when their object exists in reality. For Brentano, such acts, besides their intentionality, have a peculiar relation of similarity to their object. However, there is no mention of Brentano’s distinction between intentionality and reference in the literature. Drawing on some lesser known texts, this paper aims both at showing that Brentano makes such (...) a distinction and at underscoring the philosophical significance of his position. (shrink)

In this study, I propose to examine Marty's reconstruction of the general framework in which Brentano develops his theory of consciousness. My starting point is the formulation, at the very beginning of the second chapter of the second book of Brentano's Psychology, of two theses on mental phenomena, which constitute the basis of Brentano's theory of primary and secondary objects. In the second part, I examine the objection of infinite regress raised against Brentano's theory of primary and secondary objects and (...) Marty's interpretation of Brentano's theory of the unity of consciousness. The third part bears on the important distinction between implicit and explicit consciousness, which Brentano introduces in his lectures on descriptive psychology. Here, I analyse Marty's principle of individuation in light of the modifications which Brentano made to his theory of consciousness after the publication of his Psychology in 1874. The last section is an examination of Marty's conception of consciousness as self-consciousness with respect to his principle of individuation. (shrink)