This paper is about Brentano’s philosophical program in Vienna and the overall architecture, which binds together the main parts of his philosophy. I argue that this program is based on Brentano’s project of philosophy as science and it aims to account for the unity of the main branches of his philosophy. The paper is divided into six parts. The first bears on Brentano’s philosophy of history, which is an important piece of the program. The second is on the close relationship (...) between philosophy and science, and the third is on Brentano’s classification of theoretical sciences. In the three remaining parts of the paper, I examine the two main axes of the program, i.e. psychology and metaphysics, and the question how the three normative sciences are rooted in psychology. In the conclusion, I argue that Brentano’s theory of the four phases in the history of philosophy provides his philosophical program with a justification. (shrink)

This paper is about the reception of Ernst Mach by Brentano and his students in Austria. I shall outline the main elements of this reception, starting with Brentano’s evaluation, in his lectures on positivism, of Mach’s theory of sensations. Secondly, I shall comment the early reception of Mach by Brentano’s pupils in Prague. The third part bears on the close relationship that Husserl established between his phenomenology and Mach’s descriptivism. I will then briefly examine Mach’s contribution to the controversy on (...) gestalt qualities. The fifth part bears on Stumpf’s debate with Mach on psychophysical relations and I shall conclude on Husserl’s criticism of Mach’s alleged logical psychologism. (shrink)

My aim in this study is to show that the philosophical program elaborated by Brentano in his Psychology is largely indebted to the research conducted by Brentano on British empiricism and Comte's positive philosophy at Würzburg. This research represents the starting point of, and backdrop to, the project for philosophy as science, which is at the heart of his Psychology, and sheds new light on the philosophical stakes of many debates he leads in that work. Furthermore, Brentano's research informs us (...) about his philosophical preoccupations during the Würzburg period, and simultaneously provide us with a new perspective on the evolution of his thought from his habilitation at Würzburg in 1866 to his arrival in Vienna in 1874. In this study, I propose to examine some of the factors that motivated Brentano's interest in Comte's philosophy and to evaluate the influence that the latter exerted on Brentano's thought during the Würzburg period and beyond. (shrink)

En 1869, le jeune Brentano (1838-1917) consacre une étude à Auguste Comte (1798-1857), dans laquelle il rend un vibrant hommage au fondateur du positivisme. La question de la métaphysique mise à part, l’étude fait apparaître des affinités profondes entre le positivisme comtien et la philosophie de Franz Brentano : chez les deux penseurs on rencontre en fait le même refus de séparer la philosophie de la science. Au-delà de ces affinités qui existent au départ, la lecture de Comte aura durablement (...) marqué la pensée de Brentano. Tout ceci explique pourquoi l’héritage de Brentano a pu jouer un rôle certain dans l’avènement du néo-positivisme dans la Vienne des premières décennies du XX e siècle. La position particulière que Brentano occupe aussi bien par rapport au positivisme ancien qu’au néo-positivisme soulève deux problèmes majeurs. Le premier a trait au rôle que Brentano a pu jouer dans la transmission de l’idéal positiviste. Le second, plus fondamental, se rapporte aux liens généralement sous-estimés qui existent entre le néo-positivisme et la philosophie positiviste de Comte. (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)

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)

Die Abhandlung entwickelt und vertritt folgende Thesen: (1) Brentanos Vier-Phasen-Theorie wurde unabhängig von Comtes Drei-Stadien-Gesetz entworfen . (2) Aber Brentano legte großen Wert darauf, die Übereinstim- mung beider Theorien zu unterstreichen . (3) Beide Theorien gehen von verschiedenen Geschichtsauffassungen aus: Comtes Theorie schließt die Geschichte der fundamentalen positiven Wissenschaften ein, die geradli- nig verläuft, stets aufwärts führt und durch keine gesetzmäßig auftretenden Verfallsphasen belastet wird, aber dennoch Stagnationen kennt . Dagegen bezieht sich Brentanos Theorie vorwiegend auf die Geschichte der Philo- (...) sophie, allerdings indirekt auch auf die schönen Künste . Dabei verlaufen die historischen Entwicklungen zyklisch und kennen Perioden des wissen- schaftlichen Auf- und Niederganges, die sich wiederholen . (4) Beide The- orien enthalten verschiedene Strategien, die auf eine grundlegende Erneu- erung der Philosophie abzielen . Für Comte gilt, dass die neue Philosophie positiv und unabhängig von der philosophischen Tradition arbeiten müsse . Dagegen vertritt Brentano die Auffassung, nach der die Philosophie von ihrer Methode her der Naturwissenschaft analog empirisch forscht und da- bei der philosophischen Tradition prinzipiell verpflichtet bleibt. (shrink)

In recent decades, scholars have shown a distinct new willingness to concede the important place of religion in the life and thought of the philosopher Franz Brentano. However, these studies are still dominated by the presumption that Brentano's life and thought are best understood according to a model of secularisation as a progressive waning of religion. This essay asks whether such a presumption is the best way of understanding the complex interconnections between various elements of his philosophical and religious ideas. (...) It posits that a better appreciation of his position entails a confrontation with Brentano's historical imagination, and especially the structuring role of his approach to the history of philosophy as one manifesting regular cycles of decline and regeneration. Brentano's theory of the four phases of philosophy, though not the final word on how he viewed history, was nevertheless an exercise in thinking about the ways history accommodates various forms of progress and repetition. It was therefore a salutary means for thinking about the evolution of religion in ways that challenge any simple understanding of secularisation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I analyze Brentano’s fourth habilitation thesis, according to which the philosophical method should be none other than the natural scientific one. The meaning of this thesis can be initially assessed through an examination of Brentano’s views on the relationship between natural and human sciences. His arguments for methodological unity in this debate show that he actually argues for an overarching idea of scientific knowledge, which is not restricted to the fields already recognized as scientific, but which (...) can also be applied to philosophical domain. A fuller comprehension of that idea is provided by Brentano’s writings on Comte’s positivism. RESUMO No presente artigo, analiso a quarta tese de habilitação de Brentano, de acordo com a qual o método da Filosofia tem de ser aquele da ciência natural. O sentido desta tese pode ser abordado inicialmente por meio de um exame da perspectiva de Brentano acerca da relação entre as ciências humanas e naturais. Seus argumentos em favor de uma unidade metodológica neste debate mostram que ele está efetivamente argumentando por uma ideia omni-abrangente de conhecimento científico, que não pode ser restrita aos campos já reconhecidos como científicos, mas que pode também ser aplicada ao domínio filosófico. Uma compreensão mais robusta dessa ideia é oferecida pelos escritos de Brentano acerca do positivismo de Comte. (shrink)