Franz Brentano
German philosopher
in full Franz Clemens Brentano
born January 16, 1838, Marienberg, Hesse-Nassau [Germany]
died March 17, 1917, Zürich, Switzerland
Main
German philosopher generally regarded as the founder of act
psychology, or intentionalism, which concerns itself with
the acts of the mind rather than with the contents of the
mind. He was a nephew of the poet Clemens Brentano.
Brentano was ordained a Roman Catholic priest (1864) and
was appointed Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) in
philosophy (1866) and professor (1872) at the University of
Würzburg. Religious doubts, exacerbated by the doctrine of
papal infallibility (1870), led to his resignation from his
post and the priesthood (1873).
Brentano then began writing one of his best-known and
most influential works, Psychologie vom empirischen
Standpunkte (1874; “Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint”), in which he tried to present a systematic
psychology that would be a science of the soul.
Concerned with mental processes, or acts, he revived and
modernized the scholastic philosophical theory of
“intentional existence,” or, as he called it, “immanent
objectivity”; in psychical phenomena, he held, there is a
“direction of the mind to an object” (e.g., one sees
something). The object seen is said to “inexist” within the
act of seeing or to have “immanent objectivity.” He
suggested that, fundamentally, the mind can refer to objects
by perception and ideation, including sensing and imagining;
by judgment, including acts of acknowledgment, rejection,
and recall; and by loving or hating, which take into account
desires, intentions, wishes, and feelings. The ideas
expressed in the Psychologie formed the credo of his
followers and became the starting point of their work.
In 1874 Brentano was appointed professor at the
University of Vienna. His decision to marry in 1880 was
blocked by Austrian authorities, who refused to accept his
resignation from the priesthood and, considering him still a
cleric, denied him permission to marry. He was forced to
resign his professorship, and he moved with his wife to
Leipzig. The following year he was allowed to return to the
University of Vienna as a Privatdozent, and he remained
there until 1895. He enjoyed wide popularity with his
students, among whom were psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud,
psychologist Carl Stumpf, philosopher Edmund Husserl, and
Tomáš Masaryk, the founder of modern Czechoslovakia. Another
major work of Brentano’s, Untersuchungen zur
Sinnespsychologie (“Inquiry into Sense Psychology”),
appeared in 1907. Completing his early masterwork was Von
der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene (1911; “On the
Classification of Psychological Phenomena”).
