This paper is the general introduction to a collection of essays entitled Franz Brentano and Austrian Philosophy (forthcoming). In this substantial introduction, I comment several aspects of the recent reception of Brentano’s philosophical programme in contemporary philosophy, and the actual debates on topics such as emotions, values, and intentionality, for example. It is divided in four parts corresponding to the four sections of the book. The first three sections contain 11 original contributions on Brentano’s philosophy and its place in the (...) history of philosophy in Austria, and the last section contains three unpublished manuscripts from Alfred Kastil et Moritz Schlick. I. Descriptive psychology and phenomenology: Brentano and Husserl II. Brentano and the Vienna Circle III. Brentano and the history of philosophy IV. Documentation: Alfred Kastil and the Vienna Circle . (shrink)

Kotarbiński is one of the leading figures in the Lvov-Warsaw school of Polish philosophy. We summarize the development of Kotarbiński’s thought from his early nominalism and ‘pansomatistic reism’ to the later doctrine of ‘temporal phases’. We show that the surface clarity and simplicity of Kotarbiński’s writings mask a number of profound philosophical difficulties, connected above all with the problem of giving an adequate account of the truth of contingent (tensed) predications. The paper will examine in particular the attempts to resolve (...) these difficulties on the part of Leśniewski. It will continue with an account of the relations of Kotarbińskian reism to the ontology of things or entia realia defended by the later Brentano. Kotarbiński’s identification of Brentano as a precursor of reism is, it will be suggested, at least questionable, and the paper will conclude with a more careful attempt to situate the Brentanian and Kotarbińskian ontologies within the spectrum of competing ontological views. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore one particular dimension of Brentano’s legacy, namely, his theory of mental analysis. This theory has received much less attention in recent literature than the intentionality thesis or the theory of inner perception. However, I argue that it provides us with substantive resources in order to conceptualize the unity of intentionality and phenomenality. My proposal is to think of the connection between intentionality and phenomenality as a certain combination of part/whole relations rather than as a supervenience (...) or identity relation. To begin, I discuss some reasons for being a (neo-)Brentanian about the mind and briefly introduce the main characteristics of Brentano’s internalist description program. Then, I turn to the current “inseparatist” way of dealing with intentionality and phenomenality, focusing on the demand for unity coming from advocates of phenomenal intentionality. I suggest that the unity of the mind may be put in a new light if we put aside metaphysical–epistemological questions, go back to Brentano’s description program, and endorse his thesis that the mental is something unified in which various parts must be distinguished. In the last section, I draw some lessons from this approach, holding that, for any representational content R, R is (in Brentano’s terms) an abstractive or “distinctional” part of the relevant state and that, for any qualitative aspect Q, Q is an abstractive or “distinctional” part of the relevant representational content R. (shrink)

This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so much (...) to demonstrate the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science. (shrink)

Tadeusz Kotarbinski is one of towering figures in contemporary Polish philosophy. He was a great thinker, a great teacher, a great organizer of philosophical and scientific life, and, last but not least, a great moral authority. He died at the age of 96 on October 3, 1981. Kotarbinski was active in almost all branches of philosophy. He made many significant contributions to logic, semantics, ontology, epistemology, history of philosophy, and ethics. He created a new field, namely praxiology. Thus, using an (...) ancient distinction, he contributed to theoretical as well as practical philoso~hy. Kotarbinski regarded praxiology as his major philosophical "child". Doubtless, praxiology belongs to practical philosophy. This collection, howewer, is mainly devoted to Kotarbinski' s theoretical philosophy. Reism - Kotarbinski' s fundamental idea of ontology and semantics - is the central topic of most papers included here; even Pszczolowski' s essay on praxiology considers its ontological basis.,Only two papers, namely that of Zarnecka-Bialy and that of Wolenski, are not linked with reism. However, both fall under the general label "Kotarbinski: logic, semantics and ontology". The collection partly consists of earlier published papers. (shrink)

Despite its internal divisions and the uncertainty surrounding many of its foundations, there is a growing consensus that the on‐going search for an alternative model of the mind finds a minimal theoretical identity in the pursuit of an anti‐Cartesian conception of mental phenomena. Nevertheless, this anti‐Cartesianism remains more or less explicitly committed to the neo‐Brentanian idea that intentionality is an essential feature of the mental—an idea that has prevailed since the advent of modern cognitive science in the 1950s. An issue (...) of compatibility is thereby raised, as neo‐Brentanism arguably sides with cognitive Cartesianism. The main goal of the paper is to put into full light one specific aspect of this largely unperceived problem of compatibility by arguing that the neo‐Brentanian property of intentionality is an essentially representational one that runs counter to the salient anti‐representationalism of anti‐Cartesianism. And, that this representational essence confronts the search for alternative models of the mind of an anti‐Cartesian kind with the following theoretical issue: To what extent is it possible to devise a non‐Brentanian property of intentionality, particularly one that is fully dissociated from the property of representation? This issue is shown to be much deeper and more difficult than it looks once the nature of representation is properly apprehended; it seems to be still waiting for an answer in the current search for an alternative model of the mind, if only because it has not yet be set in fully adequate terms. (shrink)

After describing the philosophical background of Kerry's work, an account is given of the way Kerry proposed to supplement Bolzano's conception of logic with a psychological account of the mental acts underlying mathematical judgements.In his writings Kerry criticized Frege's work and Kerry's views were then attacked by Frege.The following two issues were central to this controversy: (a) the relation between the content of a concept and the object of a concept; (b) the logical roles of the definite article. Not only (...) did Frege in 1892 offer an unconvincing solution to Kerry's puzzle concerning 'the concept horse' but he also overlooked the many criticisms levelled by Kerry against the notion of an (indefinite) extension on which his own definition of number was based. (shrink)

The most striking feature of Meinong's theory of intentionality is his thesis that every mental act has its reference‐object “beyond being and non being”. This theory seems, at first, to be a clear example of the so called object‐theory of intentionality, as it introduces special “postulated” entities in the target‐position of the mental act. Closer examination, however, reveals in Meinong's works important elements of the mediator‐theory. Meinong speaks of auxiliary incomplete objects situated “between” the subject and the object of reference (...) and “mediating” the intentional access to the reference‐object. Moreover, even if the object of reference is of the simple nominal form, the mediating structure involves essentially propositional entities . In the paper we attempt to give a set‐theoretical interpretation of Meinong's theory in the frame of which we could eventually do without the incomplete mediating objects. Yet, some general epistemological considerations suggest the indispensability of such incomplete mediating structures. (shrink)