Conventional approaches to consciousness assume that our current science tells us within tolerable limits what physical nature is. Because nature so understood cannot explain consciousness as we seem to experience it ourselves, explaining consciousness becomes a problem. One solution is to rethink what consciousness is so that it becomes the sort of thing our current natural science could in principle explain. Whitehead takes the opposite approach, using the existence of consciousness as a clue to what nature must be if it (...) can generate something like consciousness. The justification for this approach can be found in Whitehead’s implicit indictment of descriptive phenomenology. According to Whitehead, the seemingly insoluble problem of explaining consciousness naturalistically is an artifact created by the assumption that consciousness faithfully samples the world, when in fact it obscures the very aspects of nature that are indispensable to understanding how anything, including consciousness itself, could emerge through a physical process. (shrink)

If you’re a professional philosopher, you’ve probably heard of Brentano as the thinker who reintroduced the notion of intentionality into modern philosophy. If you’re not a professional philosopher, you’ve probably never heard of him. But Brentano’s philosophical work expands far beyond the theme of intentionality and constitutes in fact a complete philosophical system, with well worked out and strikingly original theories in every major area of philosophy. The purpose of this article is to provide a panoramic yet digestible overview of (...) Brentano’s contributions in most areas of philosophy, with greater focus on theoretical philosophy. The article is written to be understood without any background in philosophy, and in fact may double as an introduction to the various branches philosophy itself. (shrink)

The majority of the papers in the present volume were presented at, or prepared in conjunction with, meetings of the Seminar for Austro-German Philosophy, a group of philosophers interested in the work of Brentano and Husserl and of the...

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)

The convergences in approach between Freud's psychoanalysis and Husserl's phenomenology are elaborated. These include philosophical roots in Brentano's teachings; the primacy of direct observation over construction and theory; a conviction about the irreducibility of mentality to nature; the project of a "pure" psychology; the bracketing of theories, preconceptions, and the natural attitude; the necessity of self-reflection and empathy; a relational theory of meaning; receptivity to human subjects as teachers; and the methodological value of fiction for scientific truth. It is argued (...) that divergences between psychoanalytic and phenomenological theory have obscured profound agreement in the approach, subject matter, and methods of these two schools of psychology. (shrink)

Brentano’s views on psychology influenced the way philosophy was made at the beginning of the 20th century. But did this influence spread as far as to give place to Freud’s revolutionary discovery of the psychoanalytical unconscious? There are reasons to believe that Brentano had a profound influence on Freud. An attentive analysis of Freud’s vocabulary as well as his arguments against “philosophical” objections supports this point rather convincingly. However, Freud was not a philosopher and Brentano’s historical influence does not suffice (...) to transform the Freudian unconscious in a philosophical concept. It is the purpose of this paper to sketch a way to make a philosophical use of Freud’s unconscious by reconstructing the dialogue between Brentano and Freud on a conceptual level. Despite the explicit critique of the unconscious that we find in Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, I show that Freud never truly opposed Brentano. He rather took Brentano’s descriptive psychology a step further: he introduced a dynamic component to the analysis of the psyche that is complementary to Brentano’s descriptive psychology and could be considered a type of genetic psychology. (shrink)