The Brentano Puzzle

Even if the width and the depth of Brentano’s intellectual legacy are now quite well known, those asked to list the principal philosophers of the 19th century, very rarely do mention his name. We may call this puzzle the problem of Brentano’s 'invisibility'. One component of the Brentano’s puzzle is that a number of Brentano’s outstanding pupils achieved their own success and founded their own schools. Suffice to mention Husserl’s phenomenology, Twardowski’s Lvov-Warsaw school and Meinong’s Graz school. The personal success and academic recognition attained by these exponents of Brentano’s school (in the broad sense) have come to obscure their common origins. The oblivion into which Franz Brentano’s thought fell was in part due also to the subsequent split between analytic philosophy and phenomenology. The book reconstructs elements of the 'map' of the Brentanists, revitalizing knowledge of the theoretical complexity of their debates, of their unitariness, and of their style. Last but not least, analyses of the relevance of those discussions for contemporary philosophical and scientific debate are also considered.

This collection of fourteen original essays addresses the seminal contribution of Franz Brentano and his heirs, to philosophy of language. Despite the great interest provoked by the Brentanian tradition and its multiple connections with early analytic philosophy, precious little is known about the Brentanian contribution to philosophy of language. The aim of this new collection is to fill this gap by providing the reader with a more thorough understanding of the legacy of Brentano and his school, in their pursuit of a unique research programme according to which the analysis of meaning is inseparable from philosophical inquiries into what goes on in the mind and what there is in the world. In three parts, the volume first reconstructs Brentano’s pathbreaking thoughts on meaning and grammatical illusions, exploring their strong connections with the Austro-German tradition and analytic philosophy. It then addresses the multifaceted debates on the objectivity of meaning in the Brentano School and its aftermath (Meinong, Husserl, Ingarden, Twardowski and the Lvov-Warsaw School). Finally, part three explores Brentano’s wider legacy, namely: Husserl’s theory of modification and typicality, Bühler’s theory of linguistic and non-linguistic expressions, and Wittgenstein’s thoughts on guidance and rule-following. The result is a unique collection of essays which shows the significance, originality and timely character of the Brentanian philosophy of language.

Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano (1838–1917) had an often underappreciated influence on the course of twentieth- and twenty-first-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.

The book discusses Franz Brentano’s impact on Austrian philosophy. It contains both a critical reassessment of Brentano’s place in the development of Austrian philosophy at the turn of the 20th century and a reevaluation of the impact and significance of his philosophy of mind or ‘descriptive psychology’ which was Brentano's most important contribution to contemporary philosophy and to the philosophy in Vienna. In addition, the relation between Brentano, phenomenology, and the Vienna Circle is investigated, together with a related documentation of Brentano's disciple Alfred Kastil (in German). The general part deals with the ongoing discussion of Carnap's "Aufbau" (Vienna Circle Lecture by Alan Chalmers) and the philosophy of mind, with a focus on physicalism as discussed by Carnap and Wittgenstein (Gergely Ambrus). As usual, two reviews of recent publications in the philosophy of mathematics (Paolo Mancosu) and research on Otto Neurath's lifework (Jordi Cat/Adam Tuboly) are included as related research contributions. This book is of interest to students, historians, and philosophers dealing with the history of Austrian and German philosophy in the 19th and 20th century.

Before now, there has been no comprehensive analysis of the multiple relations between A. Comte’s and J.S. Mill’s positive philosophy and Franz Brentano’s work. The present volume aims to fill this gap and to identify Brentano’s position in the context of the positive philosophy of the 19th century by analyzing the following themes: the concept of positive knowledge; philosophy and empirical, genetic and descriptive psychology as sciences in Brentano, Comte and Mill; the strategies for the rebirth of philosophy in these three authors; the theory of the ascending stages of thought, of their decline, of the intentionality in Comte and Brentano; the reception of Comte’s positivism in Whewell and Mill; induction and phenomenalism in Brentano, Mill and Bain; the problem of the "I" in Hume and Brentano; mathematics as a foundational science in Brentano, Kant and Mill; Brentano’s critique of Mach’s positivism; the concept of positive science in Brentano’s metaphysics and in Husserl’s early phenomenology; the reception of Brentano’s psychology in Twardowski; The Brentano Institute at Oxford. The volume also contains the translation of the most significant writings of Brentano regarding philosophy as science. I. Tănăsescu, Romanian Academy; A. Bejinariu, Romanian Society of Phenomenology; S. Krantz Gabriel, Saint Anselm College; C. Stoenescu, University of Bucharest.

In many respects, Brentano conducted pioneering analyses of problems that are currently in the focus of cognitive science and artificial intelligence: from the problem of reference to that of representation, from the problem of categorial classification to ontology and the cognitive analysis of natural language. Brentano, in fact, dealt with and wrote on questions concerning the auditory stream (temporal apprehension), visual perception (continua, point of view, three-dimensional construction of phenomenal objects), intentionality, imagery, and conceptual space, considering these pertaining to a metaphysical enquiry. Moreover, Brentano displayed clear awareness of the complexity of problems and of the interrelations among different areas of inquiry. From this point of view, his theory, however complex, offers elements for the treatment of problems currently under investigation. Brentano's work is an antidote against physicalism and logicism, which dominated the 20th century epistemology, and as such appears to be a good philosophy candidate for cognitive science."A set of knotty questions are implied in the very title of Brentano's work "Psychology from an empirical standpoint". To solve them, Albertazzi guides us systematically through Brentano's life and works, investigating into the inherent complexity of both his view of mental life and the related methodology. In so doing, she discloses a number of threads into the open texture of modern philosophy of mind." Lia Formigari, Ordinary professor of Philosophy of Language, La Sapienza, Rome, Italy

The central idea developed by the contributions to this book is that the split between analytic philosophy and phenomenology - perhaps the most impor tant schism in twentieth-century philosophy - resulted from a radicalization of reciprocal partialities. Both schools of thought share, in fact, the same cultural background and their same initial stimulus in the thought of Franz Brentano. And one outcome of the subsequent rift between them was the oblivion into which the figure and thought of Brentano have fallen. The first step to take in remedying this split is to return to Brentano and to reconstruct the 'map' of Brent ani sm. The second task (which has been addressed by this book) is to revive inter est in the theoretical complexity of Brentano' s thought and of his pupils and to revitalize those aspects that have been neglected by subsequent debate within the various movements of Brentanian inspiration. We have accordingly decided to organize the book into two introductory es says followed by two sections (Parts 1 and 2) which systematically examine Brentano's thought and that of his followers. The two introductory essays re construct the reasons for the 'invisibility', so to speak, of Brentano and set out of his philosophical doctrine. Part 1 of the book then ex the essential features amines six of Brentano's most outstanding pupils (Marty, Stumpf, Meinong, Ehrenfels, Husserl and Twardowski). Part 2 contains nine essays concentrating on the principal topics addressed by the Brentanians.

Tracing Austrian intellectual life from Maria Theresa to Hitler's annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, this innovative book offers a precise and engaging account of Austrian intellectual history since the Enlightenment. Here, David S. Luft begins by locating his narrative in the region known as Cisleithanian Austria, the area to the west of the Leitha River that was the basis for the modern Austrian state after 1740. Chapter 2 provides a history of the German-speaking intellectual life of these central lands of the Habsburg Monarchy (Austria and Bohemia) from the Enlightenment to annexation by Nazi Germany. Chapters 3 to 5 identify the most important philosophers, writers, and social thinkers who contributed to Austrian intellectual life in the period between 1740 and 1938/1939 and address the intellectual significance of their work. Elegantly written and meticulously researched, Luft's book brings out the contributions of major figures such as Wittgenstein, Hofmannsthal, Musil, Kafka, Rilke, and Freud, but also draws attention to less well-known figures such as Bolzano, Brentano, Grillparzer, Stifter, Broch, and Hayek.