brentano's intentionality thesis: beyond the analytic and phenomenological readings

Brentano's Intentionality Thesis: Beyond the Analytic and PhenomenologicalReadings

Philip J. Bartok

Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 43, Number 4, October2005, pp. 437-460 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/hph.2005.0153

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437B R E N T A N O ’ S I N T E N T I O N A L I T Y T H E S I S

Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 43, no. 4 (2005) 437–60

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Brentano’s Intentionality Thesis:Beyond the Analytic and

Phenomenological Readings

P H I L I P J . B A R T O K *

IN HIS PSYCHOLOGY FROM AN EMPIRICAL STANDPOINT (PES) of 1874, Franz Brentano fa-mously claimed that,

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the MiddleAges called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we mightcall, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward anobject (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objec-tivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something in it as an object . . . (PES,I.124–5/88).1

No physical phenomenon exhibits anything similar (PES, I.137/97).

Taken in conjunction with the additional, and for Brentano self-evident premisethat all phenomena are either mental or physical, these two passages assert thatall and only mental phenomena are characterized by the intentional inexistenceof or directedness toward an object, a claim that has come to be known as“Brentano’s intentionality thesis” or simply “Brentano’s thesis.”2

Brentano’s thesis has proven to be an extremely suggestive and fruitful sourcefor the later researches of both analytic philosophers and phenomenologists. Butphilosophers in these two traditions have read Brentano’s thesis and his empirical

* Philip J. Bartok is Tutor at St. John’s College, Santa Fe.

1 Franz Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, ed. Oskar Kraus, 2 vols. (Hamburg: FelixMeiner, 1955); Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, 2nd ed., trans. A. Rancurello, et. al. (London:Routledge, 1995). I shall adopt the following conventions for in-text citations: References to Brentano’sPsychology from an Empirical Standpoint and Descriptive Psychology shall be indicated, respectively, by ‘PES’and ‘DP’ followed by the page numbers for the German and English editions. Page numbers for thetwo-volume German edition of PES include the volume number.

2 While Brentano’s present fame as a philosopher rests most squarely upon his purported discov-ery or “revival” of the intentionality thesis, he never actually used the term ‘intentionality’ (Intentionalität)in his published writings. Instead, he preferred to speak, as in the passage from PES quoted here, ofthe “intentional inexistence” (intentionale Inexistenz) of the objects of mental phenomena. See HerbertSpiegelberg, “‘Intention’ and ‘Intentionality’ in the Scholastics, Brentano, and Husserl,” reprinted inHerbert Spiegelberg, The Context of the Phenomenological Movement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).

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Angelia Fell

new muse

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psychology in general in very different ways.3 Influenced by Roderick Chisholm’spioneering readings of Brentano’s psychological works, analytic philosophers havefor the most part viewed Brentano as an early analytic philosopher of mind andhis intentionality thesis as an attempt to clarify the Cartesian distinction betweenthe mental and the physical/material.4 In stark contrast to this analytic reading,Edmund Husserl and his successors in the phenomenological tradition tookBrentano’s thesis to have set for them the task of exploring and describing the inten-tional relatedness of consciousness to its objects and distinguishing the variousmodes according to which these objects are “given.”5 A survey of the recent re-searches of philosophers in these two traditions reveals the continuing influenceof their respective readings of Brentano’s thesis. An important strand of researchin contemporary analytic philosophy of mind concerns the continuing search foran adequate analysis or theory of intentionality, perhaps even one that succeedsin demonstrating its reducibility to the purely physical or, failing this, its outrighteliminability.6 Recent phenomenological investigations, on the other hand, havecontinued the descriptive and interpretive exploration of intentionality or one ofits radicalized variants (e.g., Heidegger’s “Being-in-the-world,” Merleau-Ponty’s“perceptual field,” Jean-Luc Marion’s “givenness”).

In adopting and adapting Brentano’s thesis for their own purposes, neitheranalytic philosophers nor phenomenologists were especially concerned to dis-cern what Brentano himself took its significance to be. Chisholm’s “analytic” read-ing was insensitive to the metaphysical and epistemological framework within whichBrentano developed his psychology and ignored the distinctive methods that heemployed. While phenomenologists were generally more sensitive to the meth-

3 The chief source for Brentano’s empirical psychology is PES. In addition, several manuscripts,lectures, and lecture courses from his “Vienna years,” lasting from 1874 until his departure for Italy in1895, were devoted to the task of further developing his empirical psychology. Most important amongthese are the lectures published posthumously (and in incomplete form) in the volume DeskriptivePsychologie, eds. R. Chisholm and W. Baumgartner (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1982); Descriptive Psychol-ogy, trans. B. Müller (London: Routledge, 1995). See also the notes posthumously collected and pub-lished by Oskar Kraus as a third volume of PES, entitled Vom sinnlichen und noetischen Bewußtsein (Leipzig:Felix Meiner, 1928); Sensory and Noetic Consciousness, trans. M. Schättle and L. McAlister (London,Routledge, 1981). Brentano also identified his ethical works of the Vienna years as examples of de-scriptive psychological analyses. See, e.g., the 1889 lecture published as Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis,ed. O. Kraus (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1955); The Origin of our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, trans. R,Chisholm and E. Schneewind (New York: Humanities Press, 1969); and the 1876–94 courses on prac-tical philosophy collected in Grundlegung und Aufbau der Ethik (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1978); TheFoundation and Construction of Ethics, ed. E. Schneewind (New York: Humanities Press, 1973).

4 Chisholm’s approach to reading Brentano is presented most clearly in his “Intentionality,” inEncyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York” Macmillan, 1967), vol. 4, 201–4. See also hisPerceiving (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), ch. 11; and “Brentano on Descriptive Psychol-ogy and the Intentional,” in Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. E. Lee and M. Mandelbaum (Balti-more: Johns Hopkins University Press), 1967. W. V. O. Quine accepts Chisholm’s reading of Brentano’sthesis, but rejects his further claim that Brentano’s thesis entails the failure of physicalism. Cf., e.g., hisWord and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), esp. 221; “States of Mind,” Journal of Philosophy 82(1985), 5–8; and Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 71.

5 Cf. esp. the fifth and sixth of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, 2 vols., trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. D.Moran (New York: Routledge, 2001), and his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenom-enological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Boston: Kluwer, 1982).

6 For a survey of recent work on intentionality in the analytic tradition, see John Haugeland,“The Intentionality All-Stars,” Philosophical Perspectives 4 (1990), 383–427.

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odological aspects of Brentano’s psychology, they tended to read his work as aninnovative but failed attempt to achieve their own goal of a truly phenomenologi-cal philosophy.7 While it would be unfair to characterize either of these readingsas an outright misreading of Brentano’s thesis, each reads Brentano in terms ofphilosophical concerns and standards that were not his own.

The task of this paper is to navigate a route between the excesses of these twoinfluential readings of Brentano’s thesis. By attending closely to both the motivat-ing concerns and the distinctive methodological features of Brentano’s psychol-ogy, as it is presented in PES and in the posthumously published lectures on De-scriptive Psychology (DP), this reading aims to avoid both the methodologicalinsensitivity of the analytic reading and the Whiggishness of the phenomenologi-cal reading while preserving what is of value in each. The picture of Brentano thatemerges from such an investigation is that of an innovating founder of a newempirical psychology, a psychology that was to serve as the foundation not onlyfor metaphysics, but also for fields like logic, ethics, and aesthetics. While thispsychology bears significant methodological and doctrinal similarities to both con-temporary analytic philosophy of mind and phenomenology, the attempt to iden-tify its methods and concerns with those of either of these two successors occludeswhat is truly distinctive about it. An appreciation of the distinctive character ofBrentano’s psychology permits a fairer reading of his intentionality thesis andthus allows for a more accurate assessment of the complex relationship ofBrentano’s empirical psychology to the philosophical and psychological works ofhis twentieth-century successors on both sides of the Atlantic.8

I shall proceed as follows: In section 1 I survey the “analytic reading” ofBrentano’s thesis, drawing attention to its misunderstandings of the centralBrentanian terms ‘phenomena’ and ‘intentional inexistence’ as well as its generalinsensitivity to Brentano’s psychological method. Section 2 introduces the “phe-nomenological reading” as an improvement upon the analytic reading, in that itattends to methodological issues, permitting distinctions to be drawn betweendescriptive psychological, genetic psychological, metascientific, and metaphysicalelements in his work. Section 3 criticizes the tendency of phenomenologists toimpute their own theoretical motives to Brentano and his psychological project.Finally, section 4 introduces the elements of a third reading of Brentano’s thesisand of the psychological project of PES and DP as a whole, one that takes seri-ously his claim to be an empirical psychologist intent upon erecting a new psy-chology upon solid theoretical foundations.

7 Two striking examples of such a reading are Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Tran-scendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970) and the“Preliminary Part” of Heidegger’s History of the Concept of Time, trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington, IN: Indi-ana University Press, 1985).

8 Several recent contributions to the project of recovering the philosophical and empirical psy-chological projects of Brentano and the members of his school “on their own terms” have been col-lected in two recent volumes: The Brentano Puzzle, ed. Roberto Poli (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998);The School of Franz Brentano, eds. Liliana Albertazzi, Massimo Libardi, and Roberto Poli (Boston: Kluwer,1996). See also Barry Smith’s recent monograph, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano(LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1994).

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1 . T H E A N A L Y T I C R E A D I N G

What I shall call the “analytic” reading of Brentano’s thesis is actually a style ofreading that originated in Roderick Chisholm’s interpretations of Brentano’s psy-chology. These interpretations have been, for better or worse, deeply influentialin contemporary analytic philosophy. Brentano’s empirical psychological worksremained untranslated into English until the 1973 publication of the Englishedition of PES. His later psychological lecture courses, collected in DP, were pub-lished even later (in German in 1982 and in English translation only in 1995).Rather than consulting these original texts, philosophers in the analytic traditionhave generally tended to rely upon Chisholm’s readings of Brentano. Indeed, thebroadly Chisholmian reading has come to represent something like the receivedview of Brentano’s philosophy and empirical psychology among contemporaryanalytic philosophers of mind. This reading may thus with some justification becalled the “analytic reading” of Brentano and his thesis.9 I shall argue, however,while the analytic reading has been extremely fruitful philosophically, it rests uponfundamental misunderstandings of Brentano’s project in PES and DP. These mis-understandings include not only misinterpretations of specific Brentanian con-cepts and doctrines (e.g., the concept of phenomenon, the doctrine of inten-tional inexistence, and, more generally, Brentano’s thesis itself) but also confusionsabout the methods that he adopted in developing his empirical psychology.

Central to the analytic reading is the tendency, especially apparent in Chisholm’swritings on Brentano from the 1960’s, to read Brentano’s thesis as in fact a pair oftheses, one psychological and the other ontological.10 According to the psycho-logical thesis, intentional relatedness to an object serves as a “mark of the men-tal,” a criterion according to which mental phenomena may be distinguished fromphysical phenomena. This thesis is a psychological one because it aims to drawattention to a property unique to the mental realm, a property that is presumablyrevealed through a psychological study of mental phenomena. By contrast, the

9 In calling this reading of Brentano’s thesis the “analytic” reading I do not wish to imply that it isheld universally by all who consider themselves to be analytic philosophers. There are, for instance,more historically-minded philosophers working within the analytic tradition who would reject such areading on the basis of their own examinations of Brentano’s texts. Barry Smith and Kevin Mulligan,for example, have produced penetrating historical analyses from a broadly analytic perspective ofBrentano’s psychological and metaphysical works (See e.g., Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacyof Franz Brentano; and Kevin Mulligan and Barry Smith, “Franz Brentano on the Ontology of Mind,”Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (1984), 627–44). While Smith and Mulligan are both heavilyinfluenced by Chisholm, they by no means subscribe to the Chisholmian reading of Brentano’s thesisthat I present here. The adherents to the analytic reading that I have in mind are primarily thosephilosophers who, as participants in mainstream contemporary debates in analytic philosophy of mindconcerning intentionality, reference, and propositional attitudes, point to Brentano as having antici-pated their theoretical concerns. Since these philosophers are in general far less concerned to getBrentano right than to solve the problems that they take him to have raised, they have often beencontent to adopt uncritically Chisholm’s “analytic” reading of Brentano’s thesis (for two recent ex-amples see Daniel Dennett and John Haugeland, “Intentionality,” in The Oxford Companion to the Mind,ed. R. Gregory [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987]; and William Lycan’s entry “Functionalism,”in A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Samuel Guttenplan [London: Blackwell, 1994]). Onemainstream contemporary analytic philosopher of mind who has resisted this temptation is Tim Crane(see his entry “Intentionality” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig [London:Routledge, 1998]).

10 See esp., his “Intentionality.”

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ontological thesis is Brentano’s purported assertion that the objects intended bymental acts are objects with a special “ontological status” or unique “mode ofbeing,” namely, “intentional inexistence.”11 According to Chisholm, it was neces-sary for Brentano to posit this special mode of being in order to account for ourapparent ability to think about non-existent objects. For while our ability to thinkabout (i.e., intend) a particular, existing horse does not appear to present anygreat difficulties for the thesis that all mental phenomena are characterized byrelatedness to an object, our ability to think about a unicorn introduces the pros-pect of an intentional relation that lacks one of its relata. What Chisholm refers toas Brentano’s “doctrine of intentional inexistence” holds that “the object of [a]thought about a unicorn is a unicorn, but a unicorn with a mode of being (inten-tional inexistence, immanent objectivity, or existence in the understanding) thatis short of actuality but more than nothingness.”12 The doctrine thus aims to pre-serve the intentional relatedness of the mental even in those cases where no exist-ing object can be found to serve as a relatum. It does so by introducing a realm of“merely intentional” objects, objects that exist only in the understanding and pre-sumably only when they are being intended in presently existing mental acts.

In the later writings of Chisholm and of subsequent thinkers in the analytictradition, each of these two theses has given rise to a veritable research programin its own right. Chisholm himself read the psychological thesis as an attack uponphysicalism, since he took it (or perhaps some improved version of it) to entailthe irreducibility of the mental to the physical. Consequently, an important strandof research in his own later work was focused upon the problem of recastingBrentano’s thesis in semantic terms (as a doctrine about the logical properties ofthe kinds of sentences we must use in talking about the mental) in an attempt toproduce a version of it that would entail the failure of physicalism.13 While theattempt to produce an acceptable analysis of intentionality remains an active re-search project, contemporary analytic philosophers of mind generally reject theanti-reductionist conclusion that Chisholm sought to draw from it. The broadcontemporary consensus is that intentionality must be accounted for in physical-istic terms or, failing this, eliminated. As for the ontological thesis, Chisholm’sworries about the special status of intentional objects, i.e., their “intentional inex-istence,” have largely been absorbed by concerns about the status of the inten-tional relation. Analytic philosophers tend to be squeamish about talk of special“modes of being,” preferring instead a univocal conception of being/existencethat would assimilate all such modes to differences in an object’s properties. Thehope appears to be that a successful analysis of intentionality will show such spookyontological talk to have been unnecessary.

While the analytic reading has incontestably given rise to a rich and active fieldof research in contemporary philosophy of mind, it rests upon significant misun-derstandings of Brentano’s thesis and of the distinctive features of his empiricalpsychological approach. For one, as several commentators have noted, Chisholm

11 Chisholm, “Brentano on Descriptive Psychology and the Intentional,” 7–8.12 Chisholm, “Intentionality,” 201.13 See his “Intentionality” and “Notes on the Logic of Believing,” Philosophy and Phenomenological

Research 24 (1963), 195–201.

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and many of his successors misinterpret the crucial Brentanian term ‘phenom-ena’ (Phänomene).14 As Brentano uses this term, it does not apply, as in contempo-rary “broad” usage, to states or events in general regardless of whether these are“in the mind” or “in the world.” Instead, it is applied in a more restricted senseonly to members of the class of what Brentano calls “immediate experiential facts”(Erfahrungstatsachen), i.e., the immediate data of our conscious experience (DP,130/139). That this is so is evident in the opening sentence of the second book ofPES:

The entire domain of our conscious appearances [Die gesamte Welt unsererErscheinungen] is divided into two great classes—the class of physical and the class ofmental phenomena (PES, I.109/77, translation modified).

The examples that Brentano provides of the phenomena that fit into each ofthese classes confirm this reading. As examples of mental phenomena he cites,

hearing a sound, seeing a colored object, feeling warmth or cold, . . . similar states ofimagination, . . . the thinking of a general concept, . . . every judgment, every recol-lection, every expectation, every inference, every conviction or opinion, every doubt,. . . [and] every emotion (PES, I.111–12/79).

Under the opposed category of physical phenomena Brentano finds, “a color, afigure, a landscape which I see, a chord which I hear, warmth, cold, odor which Isense, as well as similar images which appear in the imagination” (PES, I.112/79–80). Roughly speaking, the class of mental phenomena includes all mental acts orstates, while the class of physical phenomena is comprised of what are commonlycalled “sense data” or “qualitative properties.”15 The mental/physical distinction,as Brentano understands it, is thus not a distinction between consciousness (i.e.,the mental or “inner” in something like Descartes’s sense) and the events or statesof some external physical realm (i.e., the physical or “outer” in Descartes’s sense),but is instead a distinction drawn entirely within the realm of conscious experi-ence. As Brentano insists, “all phenomena are to be called ‘inner’” (DP, 129/137,my italics).

On Chisholm’s “broad” reading of the term “phenomena,” Brentano’s thesisappears to assert the irreducibly intentional character of the mental (in Descartes’ssense) vis-à-vis the physical (also in Descartes’s sense). It thus appears on this read-ing that Brentano may be called upon as an ally in the fight against reductionist

14 The first instance of this now oft-repeated criticism (at least, the first of which I am aware) isLinda McAlister’s in her “Chisholm and Brentano on Intentionality,” in The Philosophy of Brentano, ed.L. McAlister (London: Duckworth, 1976). For three forceful recent statements of the objection, seeDermot Moran, “The Inaugural Address: Brentano’s Thesis,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supple-mental volume 70 (1996), 1–27; David Bell, Husserl (London: Routledge, 1990), 8; and Tim Crane,“Intentionality.”

15 Of course, strictly speaking “a landscape which I see” is not a sense datum. I side with OskarKraus here in regarding its inclusion among examples of physical phenomena as a misstep on Brentano’spart: The only sense in which a landscape can be a physical phenomenon is as a collection of extendedcolored shapes which are taken (i.e., judged) to be a landscape. Brentano’s view here is similar toAristotle’s claim (in De An. II.6, 418a20–25) that while we perceive in the strict sense of the term onlya white thing, we also thereby perceive, per accidens, the son of Diares. See Kraus’s discussion in PES,English translation, 79, fn. 2. In the Appendix to his Logical Investigations, Husserl offers an insightfulcritique of Brentano’s tendency to identify sensory contents (i.e., immanent or reel components ofmental acts) with the intentional objects of those acts.

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physicalism in contemporary philosophy of mind. But Brentano’s thesis providesno support for either side in this dispute. Reading the term “phenomena” nar-rowly reveals that the thesis is merely an attempt to distinguish between two differ-ent classes of “inner” or “mental” entities. As such it entails neither the irreduc-ibility nor the reducibility of the mental to the physical. Brentano’s distinction oftwo classes of conscious appearance simply fails to coincide with the Cartesiandistinction that interests Chisholm and his analytic followers.16

Further evidence that the interpretation of the term ‘phenomena’ upon whichthe analytic reading rests is not tenable is provided by the metaphysical and epis-temological context in which Brentano situates his empirical psychology. To asurprising degree, Brentano’s empiricism is recognizably a descendant of Locke’s.Locke famously claimed that the faculties of reflection and sensation are the dualfounts from which all of our knowledge flows.17 If these faculties are absent or notfunctioning, the mind remains a tabula rasa, possessing only various potentialitiesfor knowing but lacking any actual knowledge. In Brentano, these Lockean facul-ties are recast as two “modes of perception” (Weisen der Wahrnehmung), respec-tively, “inner perception” and “outer perception” (PES, 7/4). Not surprisingly, onBrentano’s view this distinction between two modes of perception correlates pre-cisely with the distinction between mental and physical phenomena: inner per-ception gives us access to mental phenomena, while it is through outer percep-tion that we are put in contact with physical phenomena. Further, since Brentanofollows Locke in explicitly rejecting innatism,18 the sciences must take all of theirdata from these two perceptual sources, with the natural sciences relying prima-rily upon outer perception and psychology upon inner perception. The resultingconception of both psychology and the natural sciences as sciences of phenom-ena is in keeping with the positivist and phenomenalist tradition of the late 19thcentury, a tradition that most likely influenced Brentano’s thought through hisengagement with the philosophy of Auguste Comte.19 From the broadly Lockeanmetaphysical standpoint shared by both Brentano and Comte, our access to theworld is mediated through phenomena (analogous to Locke’s “ideas”). Since it isonly phenomena to which both inner and outer perception give us direct access,any talk of either mental or physical substances must be admitted to be a refer-ence to things with which we have no direct experiential contact.20 Brentano’s

16 See Dermot Moran, “The Inaugural Address: Brentano’s Thesis.”17 See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. R. Woolhouse (London: Pen-

guin, 1997), Book II, ch. 1.18 In the 13th of his Habilitation theses, Brentano defended “empiricism,” the thesis that there is

nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses.19 See Brentano’s essay “Auguste Comte und die positive Philosophie” in Franz Brentano, Die Vier Phasen

der Philosophie und ihr augenblicklicher Stand (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1926). On Brentano’s relation toComte, see also Dieter Münch, “Brentano and Comte,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 35 (1989), 33–54.

20 Thus Brentano departs from Aristotle in that he pursues a “Psychologie ohne Seele.” This isnot to say that he rejects the thesis that a soul exists. Rather, he sees this “metaphysical hypothesis” ashaving no place in a properly empirical psychology. If Brentano’s empirical psychology is to serve as aground for metaphysics, it must avoid involvement in metaphysical commitments of its own. AsBrentano’s phenomenological readers point out, however, his empirical psychology is far from meta-physics-free (see sec. 2 below). On the sense in which empirical psychology is to serve as a ground formetaphysics, see Mauro Antonelli, Seindes, Bewußtsein, Intentionalität im Frühwerk von Franz Brentano(Freiburg: Alber, 2001), ch. IX (esp. 236), ch. XIII (esp. 338–40).

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view of the natural sciences is thus similar to Comte’s: The natural sciences pro-ceed by positing unobservable theoretical entities (i.e., substances and their prop-erties) which, in interacting with our sensory apparatus, cause the sensory phe-nomena that appear in our consciousness.21

Given the overall metaphysical and epistemological framework of Brentano’spsychology, it should be clear that he cannot be using the term ‘phenomena’ inthe way that the analytic reading takes him to be. The epistemological constraintsset in place by the Lockean metaphysical framework in which Brentano developshis psychology preclude direct access to the “external” world of material substances.Brentano’s thesis, purportedly grounded in the “self-evident” data of consciousexperience, can make reference to the entities of this realm only at the cost ofabandoning its claim to apodicticity. But Brentano insists upon the ability of hispsychology, in contrast to all of the physical sciences, to achieve universality andapodicticity in at least some of its claims.22 Brentano’s thesis, a universal claimabout a fundamental difference that distinguishes all mental phenomena fromall physical phenomena, must be admitted to be one such claim: It is no mereempirical generalization, but an attempt to specify an essential difference betweenthese two classes of phenomena. Chisholm’s tendency, in spite of this, to readBrentano’s thesis in terms of a “broad” or “realist” interpretation of the term ‘phe-nomena’ is most likely a consequence of his own professed commitment to aform of “commonsense” realism, inherited from philosophers like Thomas Reidand G. E. Moore.23 But such a realism is foreign to the metaphysical and episte-mological context in which Brentano develops his empirical psychology.

Beyond its misinterpretation of the crucial Brentanian term ‘phenomena,’ theanalytic reading is also guilty of a misunderstanding of Brentano’s doctrine ofintentional inexistence. Specifically, Brentano’s use of the term ‘inexistence’ hasbeen a source of much confusion. Contemporary analytic commentators haveoften read the term as being equivalent to ‘non-existence’.24 Read in this way, thedoctrine of intentional inexistence asserts that the objects of intentional acts neednot actually exist in order to serve as intentional objects, as the case of our abilityto think about a unicorn purportedly illustrates. But as Brentano uses the term,the ‘in’ in ‘inexistence’ refers in its primary sense not to the failure of at leastsome intentional objects to exist, but to the fact that they must be understood asexisting, in a sense that remains to be clarified, inside or within consciousness.

21 Of course, external causes may be posited only for those phenomena whose proximate cause islocatable in the external stimulation of the sensory apparatus. The phenomena of the imagination arenot, Brentano supposes, subject to natural scientific explanation.

22 For Brentano this was a crucial point about the descriptive branch of his psychology: Its “em-pirical standpoint” did not, on his view, prevent it from being able to attain to a “certain ideal point ofview” (PES, I.1/xxvii). Though psychology, like the natural sciences, must generally operate in reli-ance upon inductive methods, it may on occasion bypass induction altogether and make apodicticgeneral claims concerning the a priori relations of concepts (see DP, 70ff/73ff).

23 See Chisholm’s discussion of the influences on his thought in his introductory essay in ThePhilosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1997). A potential addi-tional source for Chisholm’s tendency to emphasize the metaphysical features of Brentano’s empiricalworks is his close engagement with Brentano’s metaphysical and ontological writings.

24 For one example of this reading see Daniel Dennett and John Haugeland, “Intentionality”384.

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That is, the ‘in’ is intended not to negate existence, but to modify or specify it.25

To his credit, Chisholm does not make this mistake. But while his reading ofBrentano’s thesis is thus at least in this respect on the right track, it fails to dojustice to the kind of claim that Brentano intended his thesis to be. As we shall see,given the methodological framework of Brentano’s empirical psychology, his in-tentionality thesis must be understood as a descriptive psychological claim. What thesignificance of this is and how it entails the untenability of the analytic reading ofBrentano’s thesis are matters that must await a careful examination of the natureof his descriptive psychological method, an examination like that undertaken byhis readers in the phenomenological tradition.

2 . T H E P H E N O M E N O L O G I C A L R E A D I N G

Like Chisholm and his followers in the analytic tradition, phenomenologists alsofound much of interest in Brentano’s thesis. As Husserl openly admitted, Brentano’sintentionality thesis constituted “a great discovery, without which phenomenol-ogy would never have been possible.”26 Similarly, for Heidegger, phenomenology“became possible upon the basis provided by Brentano’s descriptive psychology.”27

But while phenomenologists were forthcoming in admitting their indebtednessto Brentano, they were at the same time concerned to distinguish their own doc-trines and methods from his.28 As a result, on their preferred strategy for readinghim Brentano came to look like a reluctant “proto-phenomenologist,” a thinkerwhose insights paved the way for the development of a full-fledged phenomenol-ogy but who remained unwilling and unable to appreciate the true significance ofhis own advances.29 This ambivalent attitude is reflected in phenomenologists’assessments of specific Brentanian doctrines, including his intentionality thesis.At the heart of what I shall call the “phenomenological reading” of Brentano’sthesis is the charge that while this thesis represented an essential advance withoutwhich phenomenology would not have been possible, Brentano’s own psycho-logical interpretation of the thesis obscured its broader philosophical significance.Indeed, for the early phenomenologists, Brentano’s “psychologism” and his naïvecommitment to a Cartesian-Lockean metaphysics bore broad implications notonly for his ability properly to understand intentionality, but for the tenability of

25 This is not to deny that Brentano also occasionally spoke (in Meinongian fashion) of inten-tional objects as being literally “non-existent.” On this see the discussion in sec. 2 below.

26 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy,Second Book, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Boston: Kluwer, 1989), 422.

27 Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 24.28 See e.g., Husserl’s largely negative assessment of Brentano’s significance in Ideas Pertaining to a

Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book, trans. T. Klein and W. Pohl (Bos-ton: Kluwer, 1980), 50–51.

29 Husserl’s account of his 1907 meeting with Brentano in Florence is telling: “we did not under-stand each other . . . I was hindered by the inner conviction that he, having become firmly entrenchedin his way of looking at things, and having established a firm system of concepts and arguments, wasno longer adaptable enough to be able to understand the necessity that had forced me to transformhis basic intuitions.” Graciously, Husserl admitted that, “perhaps some of the fault lies with me.” SeeEdmund Husserl, “Reminiscences of Franz Brentano,” in The Philosophy of Brentano, ed. L. McAlister(London: Duckworth, 1976), 54–55.

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his empirical psychological project as a whole.30 As both Husserl and Heideggerread him, Brentano had introduced in his descriptive psychology many of theessentials of the method that would come to lie at the heart of the phenomeno-logical approach. However, his assumption that descriptive study of the mental mustbe carried out at the psychological level missed the possibility of a transcendental(and thus properly philosophical) investigation.31 Similarly, while he undertookan ontological investigation of the basic categories of modes of consciousness, hisquestionable reliance on the faculty of inner perception and the psychologicalframework this involved prevented his investigations from being extended to thevarious categories of “objects,” the correlates of these modes of consciousness.32

Finally, while his work raised the possibility of a truly phenomenological ontologypursued in accordance with a return to the “things themselves,” his naïve anddogmatic commitment to “Cartesianism” prevented him from appreciating theneed for a prior inquiry into the meaning of the being of the mental.33

In spite of their ambivalence, these criticisms reveal that the earlyphenomenologists were far more concerned than their analytic counterparts tounderstand the methodological aspects of Brentano’s empirical psychology. Un-like Chisholm, for example, who took Brentano to be essentially a philosopher ofmind parading as an empirical psychologist, phenomenologists took seriously hisclaim to be instituting a new, empirically-based psychology and thus assumed thatmany of his central doctrines were properly understood as psychological ratherthan metaphysical or philosophical claims. Most importantly, phenomenologiststook seriously the claim of Brentano’s descriptive psychology to be a descriptive (asopposed to theorizing) approach to the study of mental phenomena. Our task inthe present section will be to examine the significance of this for a more adequateunderstanding of Brentano’s thesis.

Descriptive psychology is one of the two branches into which Brentano divideshis empirical psychology. In his lectures on descriptive psychology, he draws thedistinction between these branches in terms of two basic tasks that he sets for hisempirical psychology, namely:

exhaustively determining (if possible) the elements of human consciousness andthe ways in which they are connected, and . . . describing the causal conditions towhich the particular phenomena are subjected. (DP, 1/3, translation modified)

The first of the tasks identified here is the taxonomic project of distinguishingmental phenomena, sorting them into appropriate kinds or categories, and speci-fying the various ways in which they may be composed into wholes or decom-posed into parts. The second is the causal-explanatory task of demonstrating how

30 Edmund Husserl, Introduction to the Logical Investigations, ed. Eugen Fink, trans. P. Bossert andC. Peters (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 61. See also Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time,46; and Emmanuel Lévinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. A. Orianne (Evanston,IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 46.

31 Husserl, Ideas II, 326, 422, 424, see also his Erste Philosophie, 2 vols., ed. R. Boehm (The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), I.349.

32 Husserl, Ideas II, 424–25. It should be noted that in DP Brentano does extend his descriptiveinvestigations to include the study of intentional objects.

33 Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 46–47. See also Lévinas, The Theory of Intuition inHusserl’s Phenomenology, 91, 93.

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complexes of phenomena arise (in time) and give rise to one another. The formertask is recognizably one for which a static “descriptive” analysis is appropriate,while the causal-explanatory task is a project demanding a “genetic” investiga-tion. Accordingly, the fundamental division in psychology’s tasks corresponds di-rectly in Brentano’s thought to the methodological division between the descriptivepsychological and genetic psychological approaches.

While Brentano explicitly drew the descriptive/genetic distinction only afterthe publication of the first edition of PES, commentators have not hesitated tofind it implicit in PES’s structure and content.34 Brentano’s clearest statement ofthe distinction, however, can be found in a lecture given on the occasion of hisdeparture from Vienna in 1895:

My school distinguishes between psychognosy [i.e. descriptive psychology] and ge-netic psychology (in distant analogy to geognosy and geology). The former showsthe ultimate psychic constituents out of the combination of which the entirety ofpsychic phenomena is built up (as the entirety of words is built up out of the lettersof the alphabet). Its development can serve as the basis for a characteristica universalis,as sought by Leibniz and before him Descartes. The latter teaches us about the lawsaccording to which these phenomena arise and pass away.35

As this passage makes clear, the analytic and classificatory task, likened to thesearch for a Cartesian-Leibnizian characteristica universalis, demands a descriptiveapproach analogous to the classificatory study of the earth’s structures known inBrentano’s time as “geognosy.” The other task, the discovery of laws governingthe arising and decaying of mental phenomena, demands a genetic-explanatoryinvestigation analogous to geology, the explanatory study of the processes govern-ing changes in the earth’s structures.

While these analogies go some way toward clarifying the distinction betweendescriptive and genetic psychology, Brentano also offered more direct clarifica-tions. Genetic psychology, as a causal-explanatory examination of the arising andpassing away of mental phenomena, retains close ties with physiology and theother natural sciences, since many mental phenomena arise as a direct result ofphysiological conditions in the body or because of physical stimulation of thesensory apparatus. It is thus in the context of genetic psychology that the tradi-tional psychophysical problem of the relationship of sensations to the externalphysical stimuli that causally produce them arises.36 But, as we have seen, the

34 Oskar Kraus claims that PES draws a distinction between descriptive and genetic questions, but notyet between two corresponding disciplines (PES, English translation, 7, n. 5; see also 408). Lucie Gilsonsees Book II of PES as a work of descriptive psychology, though she regards PES as a whole as aimedprimarily at the development of a genetic psychology, and as “preparing” rather than formulating thedistinction (La psychologie descriptive selon Brentano (Paris: Vrin, 1955), 45, 73, 76–78). Theodorus de Boeremphasizes the liberation (after PES) of descriptive psychology from its role in PES as a mere propaedeuticto genetic psychology (The Development of Husserl’s Thought (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 56).See also Mauro Antonelli, Seindes, Bewußtsein, Intentionalität im Frühwerk von Franz Brentano, 352–53, 435.

35 Franz Brentano, Meine letzten Wünsche für Österreich (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1895), 34, my translation.36 In the work of Brentano’s contemporaries Wilhelm Wundt and Gustav Fechner this problem

of the relationship of physical stimuli to subjective (psychological) sensations constituted the point ofdeparture for the science of psychophysics. For Brentano, such a science is possible only as an induc-tive and inferential study of the production of mental phenomena by external physical causes towhich we have no direct epistemic access.

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Lockean/Comtean phenomenalist framework of Brentano’s psychology precludesall but inferential access to these external physical stimuli.37 As a result, geneticpsychology, like the natural sciences in general, remains dependent upon induc-tive methods and thus incapable of attaining certainty in any of its claims. De-scriptive psychology, by contrast, is “pure” (untainted by physiological or othernatural scientific elements) and “exact” (able to achieve certainty in many of itsclaims). It is able to achieve this purity and exactness because of its grounding inwhat Brentano took to be the self-evident data of inner perception.

The fundamental conviction that motivated the drawing of this rigid topicaland methodological distinction was Brentano’s assumption that in any scientificinvestigation it is unprofitable to undertake a genetic-explanatory study if one hasnot identified beforehand the basic structures and classes of structures whosebehavior is to be explained. A correct classification is crucial because causal-ge-netic laws, like all scientific laws, are couched in general terms, relating proper-ties or kinds rather than individuals. For there to be a workable (i.e., useful) law-like causal-explanatory theory in any domain, the types or kinds to which the lawsgoverning that domain apply must first be identified. This prior descriptive-clas-sificatory task is, Brentano argued, all the more important in psychology, wherethere is no general agreement on what the basic kinds of structures or elementsto be studied are. The psychologist who skips this descriptive task is in danger ofmisidentifying these fundamental categories, undermining her ability to identifysuccessfully the laws governing the genesis and change of mental phenomena.

It is important to be clear here about what the “descriptive” character of de-scriptive psychology entails. For one, it is a negative characterization: Descriptivepsychology, as description, eschews all hypotheses and deductions. It is not thetask of a descriptive psychological investigation to arrive at or defend a theory ofmental phenomena, whether this theory is intended to account for the structuralfeatures of these phenomena or for the relations they bear to other mental phe-nomena. Nor is it a matter of deducing underlying structures or hidden proper-ties in an effort to account for the observed facts about the mental. Instead, de-scriptive psychology involves something like the straightforward and unbiaseddescription of what is revealed through inner perception, which Brentano re-garded as “the only arbiter” in descriptive psychological disputes (PES, II.36/200). But, significantly, descriptive psychology is not description in the everydaynaïve sense of the term, since it does involve a crucial analytic component.38 Un-like everyday description, analyzing description aims at revealing the componentparts out of which observed wholes are composed. Brentano thus introduces, inDP, the mereological apparatus of part and whole as a logical tool for distinguish-ing the varieties of parts and part-whole relationships uncovered in the realm ofmental phenomena. He also engages in detailed discussions of method, includ-

37 Thus Robin Rolliger is correct to insist that Brentano lacks the notion of a thing in theprescientific sense (Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano, 61). His point is that Brentano’s episte-mological framework allows for no non-inferential access to an external world of everyday objects.These objects can only be recovered as theoretical posits or as the result of interpretive judgmentsbased on composites of mental phenomena.

38 Thus Brentano’s tendency on occasion to speak of his method as “analyzing description”(analysierende Beschreibung) (DP, 129/137).

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ing reflections on the practices of experiencing, noticing, fixing, inductively gen-eralizing, and deductively particularizing that constitute the methodological coreof descriptive psychology.39 In PES, the method of analyzing description is em-ployed in the service of two chief tasks: (1) to identify the feature or featurescommon to all mental phenomena (i.e., intentionality), and (2) to develop aclassification of these phenomena in terms of their “natural affinities.”

Crucially for our own present study, taking seriously the claim of descriptivepsychology to be a purely descriptive study of the mental bears significant impli-cations for a proper understanding of Brentano’s thesis. After all, this thesis is, asthe phenomenological reading suggests, intended by Brentano to be a descrip-tive psychological claim. Perhaps this is obvious enough, for it is not clear whatother status it could have within the framework of his empirical psychology. As wehave seen, Brentano’s thesis is supposed to be, inter alia, a characterization ofmental phenomena in terms of a property common to them all. As such it is aclaim that can only be established, given the epistemological framework ofBrentano’s psychology, by a direct examination of mental phenomena in relianceupon the faculty of inner perception. What inner perception reveals, accordingto Brentano, is just Brentano’s thesis, i.e., that “every mental phenomenon in-cludes something in it as an object.” Taking the descriptive psychological status ofthis claim seriously reveals that it is intended to be merely an application of themereological apparatus of part and whole to the intentional relation itself. This isespecially evident in the context of Brentano’s discussions of this relation in DP:

As in every relation, two correlates can be found here. The one correlate is the act ofconsciousness, the other is that upon which it is directed. . . . [T]he two correlatesare only distinctionally separable from one another” (DP, 21/23–24).

In other words, the intentional relation is mereologically specifiable as a part-whole relation involving merely distinctional (i.e., not actually separable) parts(DP, 80/84–85). The “intentional inexistence” of the object is thus just this con-tainment of the intended object as an inseparable part of the intending act, as isrevealed by a descriptive psychological examination of mental phenomena.

In similar fashion, Brentano’s “doctrine” of inner perception also takes theform of a descriptive psychological claim. As Brentano understands it, inner per-ception involves a secondary relationship, alongside the primary intentional rela-tionship of consciousness to an object, of the conscious act to itself. But this rela-tion too is to be understood in part-whole terms, as the containment by an act ofthe very act itself as a part within a whole:

Every consciousness, upon whatever object it is primarily directed, is secondarilydirected upon itself [geht nebenher auf sich selbst] (DP, 21/25, translation modified).

The experiencing of [a] color and the secondary experiencing of this experiencingare directed towards [gehen auf] different objects. . . . [T]he parts considered here[i.e. in both cases] can only be separated distinctionally (DP, 24/27, translationmodified).

39 For a concise review of the analytic procedures developed by Brentano in DP, see Kevin Mulliganand Barry Smith, “Franz Brentano on the Ontology of Mind.”

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Brentano’s strategy here is to attempt to subject the secondary intentionality ofconsciousness to the same mereological analysis that he sought to apply to theentire range of mental phenomena. Just as the primary intentional relation isdescriptively characterizable as involving the containment of the intended objectwithin the intending act, the secondary intentional relation is characterizable asthis act’s containment of itself as a part within a whole.

English-speaking commentators have only recently begun to acknowledge, inline with the phenomenological reading, that Brentano’s thesis is intended byhim to be a descriptive psychological claim.40 However, the full implications ofthis fact have gone almost universally unappreciated. On the one hand, thesecritics concede that Brentano’s thesis is not intended to be a “theory” or “explana-tory account” of intentionality, but is instead merely an attempt to discover anddescribe a feature common to all mental phenomena.41 But, on the other hand,they persist in evaluating his thesis using standards appropriate for the evaluationof philosophical theories rather than descriptive analyses. For example, almostimmediately after arguing that PES is “almost entirely a work of descriptive [psy-chology],” David Bell chastises Brentano for not having provided “a theoreticalaccount of the nature of [the intentional] relation.”42 And both Bell and DermotMoran charge that Brentano’s “theory” of inner perception is ultimately incoher-ent.43 But given the metaphysical and epistemological framework in which de-scriptive psychology is constrained to operate, it cannot be the descriptivepsychologist’s mandate to develop anything like a “theory” of intentionality orinner perception in the traditional sense. The descriptive psychological claim thata given mental act is characterized by reference to or directedness upon an objectseeks merely to characterize descriptively the act as it is revealed in inner percep-tion. As even Moran acknowledges:

[I]t was never [Brentano’s] intention to offer an explanation of intentionality. . . .[H]e simply did not see it as the function of his ‘empirical’ or ‘descriptive psychol-ogy’ to provide such an explanation. . . . [Instead] [h]e consciously restricted him-self to what could be gained by precise description carried out by “inner percep-tion,” confident that inner perception could empirically discover fundamental a prioritruths about the mental.44

It follows from this reading of the intentionality thesis that it is not correctly readas an “ontological” thesis in Chisholm’s sense of the term. That is, it should not be

40 Cf. esp. Dermot Moran, “The Inaugural Address: Brentano’s Thesis,” and the “Prolegomenon”of David Bell, Husserl.

41 Cf. Moran, “The Inaugural Address: Brentano’s Thesis,” 3. See also Moran’s discussion ofBrentano in his Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000).

42 Bell, Husserl, 4–7, 9. For Bell, descriptive psychology is much closer to traditional philosophicalanalysis than the phenomenological reading of Brentano suggests. Thus while he is willing to admitthat PES is a work of descriptive psychology, he appears to take this to mean that it is essentially a workof philosophical analysis. Herbert Spiegelberg offers a similar diagnosis, characterizing the investiga-tions of PES as “philosophical prolegomena to an empirical psychology” (The Phenomenological Move-ment, 3rd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 32, my italics).

43 Bell, Husserl, 9; Moran, “The Inaugural Address: Brentano’s Thesis,” 20. Bell offers similarobjections to Husserl’s descriptive psychological investigation of intentionality in the Logical Investiga-tions (cf. Bell, Husserl, 115ff.).

44 Moran, “The Inaugural Address: Brentano’s Thesis,” 3.

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taken to be proposing a metaphysical or ontological theory of intentionality, onethat, for instance, attempts to get at or reveal the special “mode of being” of theintended object. Instead, it is, qua descriptive psychological claim, merely a mat-ter of the application of the part-whole apparatus to the task of descriptively char-acterizing and categorizing the contents of inner perception. If this is the case,then what is ultimately at issue for the descriptive psychologist is not the theoreticalviability of the descriptions produced by her method, but their descriptive adequacy.As Brentano repeatedly insists, despite his own forays into metaphysical specula-tion and his tendency occasionally to provide argumentative justifications of hisdescriptive psychological claims, inner perception is “the very foundation uponwhich the science of psychology is erected” (PES, I.61/43). Descriptive psycho-logical claims are justified, in the end, solely by virtue of their descriptive ad-equacy.45

Of course, there remain deep and pressing metaphysical puzzles about theontological status of the intentional object and its relationship to the denizens ofthe non-phenomenal “external world.” I am not suggesting that Brentano did notappreciate these difficulties and that he did not devote at least some of his ener-gies to their solution. Despite the rather sudden turn to empirical psychology thatpreceded his 1874 move to Vienna, Brentano never fully abandoned the meta-physical orientation of his earlier “Würzburg period.” As an examination of thelecture courses offered by Brentano between the years 1867–73 reveals, he wasgreatly occupied in this period with metaphysical issues arising out of his engage-ment with Aristotle. These issues concerned, among other things, authentic vs.inauthentic meanings of being, parts and wholes, cause and effect, the theologi-cal issue of the first cause, and the cosmological problem of accounting for theworld in its entirety.46 From the perspective of these metaphysical concerns, his1874 publication of PES might appear to represent a rather sudden shift awayfrom metaphysics toward empirical psychology. However, as Mauro Antonelli hasargued, Brentano’s turn to psychology was not a matter of abandoning metaphys-ics, but of responding to the distinctively modern demand to provide it with asolid empirical foundation.47 Metaphysics was to be set aside temporarily, in thehopes of rebuilding it later upon the metaphysics-free ground of empirical psy-chology.

But while Brentano was committed, especially in PES, to keeping metaphysicalissues firmly on the sidelines, his metaphysical interests ran too deep for this at-tempted sidelining to be fully successful. In several places in both PES and DP, heinterrupts his descriptive psychological investigations in order to reflect upon the

45 Thus Husserl’s suggestion, in the Appendix to his Logical Investigations, that debates overBrentano’s doctrine of inner perception require for their resolution a “phenomenological founda-tion” (Husserl, Logical Investigations, II.340).

46 On the content of these Würzburg metaphysics lectures, see Robin Rollinger, Husserl’s Positionin the School of Brentano, 83–86; Mauro Antonelli, Seindes, Bewußtsein, Intentionalität im Frühwerk vonFranz Brentano, ch. IX.

47 Antonelli, Seindes, Bewußtsein, Intentionalität im Frühwerk von Franz Brentano, ch. XIII. Antonellialso identifies political and career-related reasons for Brentano’s shift to empirical psychology. Brentanohimself insisted upon the ability of empirical psychology to “clarify” traditional metaphysical ques-tions like “the question of immortality, the comprehension of God in analogy to the soul, and theconcepts of cause and effect” (DP, 154/163).

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ontological implications of his account of the intentional directedness of con-sciousness.48 These metaphysical and ontological reflections are pursued furtherin various lectures, addresses, and letters from his Vienna years.49 Taken in chro-nological order, these documents chart the succession of Brentano’s ultimatelyunsuccessful attempts to provide a metaphysical theory of the intentional rela-tion. As Brentano saw it in 1874, the intentional directedness of mental phenom-ena could be toward real or “irreal” objects.50 Irreal objects were held to be “inex-istent,” in the sense that they exist only within mental acts, and only so long as therelevant act exists. But, as Brentano came to realize, this view of intentional ob-jects has several counterintuitive consequences. On the one hand, in the case ofnon-existent objects like unicorns the theory suggests that our mental acts aredirected not toward the (external) object itself, but toward the “inner” object-as-intended. But on the other hand, in the case of actually existent objects (e.g.,horses) it is unclear what role the irreal correlate is supposed to play. Does it, as inthe case of the unicorn, serve as the object of the intention? Or does it play in-stead a mediating role, “directing” the act upon the relevant external object? Ifthe former is the case, then our intentions never actually reach the external ob-jects that common sense suggests they are about. If the latter, then the intentionalobject must play different roles depending upon whether the object exists or not.51

By the 1880s–90s, Brentano had come to adopt the view that irreal objects exist(i.e., externally to consciousness) and can serve as the objects of intentional acts.This view permitted a univocal understanding of the intentional relation as therelationship of consciousness to an object (not to a mere object-as-intended). Butlike Meinong’s later theory of objects, this theory involved imputing being to en-tire classes of literally non-existent entities. Brentano’s post-1905 “reist” view rep-resented but one more attempt on his part to solve the metaphysical problem ofthe status of intentional objects. Because Brentano held at this stage that onlyconcrete substances exist and can serve as the objects of mental acts, he was forcedto view the intentional relation as a mere quasi-relation (etwas relativliches) whichneed not involve an object as relatum.52

To follow out these theoretical moves in detail, and the related moves mademembers of the “Brentano school” like Alois Höfler, Kazimierz Twardowski, and

48 An especially notable example is the following reflection on the status of intentional objects,inserted into the middle of one of Brentano’s descriptive psychological accounts of intentionality inDP: “[The] correlates [of the intentional relation] display the peculiarity that the one alone is real,[whereas] the other is not something real [nichts Reales]. A person who is being thought [ein gedachterMensch] is as little something real as a person who has ceased to be” (DP, 21/24). The intrusion ofsuch metaphysical theorizing into the middle of a descriptive psychological analysis is evidence of theextent to which Brentano was actively grappling in the 1880s and 1890s with the metaphysical issuesraised by his descriptive psychological studies.

49 See the discussion in Arkadiusz Chrudzimski, Intentionalitätstheorie beim frühen Brentano (Bos-ton: Kluwer, 2001).

50 See also DP, 21/24 and Herbert Spiegelberg’s discussion of this point in his “‘Intention’ and‘Intentionality’ in the Scholastics, Brentano, and Husserl.”

51 These issues are complicated further by the fact that they must be understood in relation toBrentano’s doctrine of the categories of mental phenomena and his theories of judgment and truth.For a careful discussion of this relationship, see Chrudzimski, Intentionalitätstheorie beim frühen Brentano,ch. 1–2.

52 On Brentano’s reism see Jan Wolenski’s “Brentano and the Reist Tradition,” in The School ofFranz Brentano, eds. L. Albertazzi, M. Libardi, and R. Poli, 357–74.

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Alexius Meinong would take us too far afield.53 What is crucial for our presentstudy is to realize that in offering such metaphysical speculations on the ontologi-cal status of the intentional object Brentano was exceeding the bounds of hisempirical psychology.54 As Herbert Spiegelberg has suggested, such speculationis “almost . . . anti-phenomenological”—or, as we might instead put it, “anti-de-scriptive-psychological”—in character.55 Neither the descriptive psychologist’scharacterizations of mental phenomena nor the genetic psychologist’s investiga-tions of the laws governing their genesis and succession entail any particular sub-stantive ontology of intentional objects.56 From the point of view of the ostensiblydescriptive investigations that Brentano carries out in PES and DP such meta-physical issues simply do not arise. That is, as long as one remains at the level ofanalyzing description of what is revealed by inner perception, questions about therelationship of the entities or ontological categories discovered therein either tothe “external” or non-phenomenal world, or to the metaphysical framework withinwhich the descriptive study itself operates, cannot even be posed. Brentano’s ownrepeated transgressions of his role as descriptive psychologist and metatheoreticianfor his new empirical psychology are evidence of the depth and continuing influ-ence of his own metaphysical interests. Similarly, it is Chisholm’s metaphysicalinterests that motivate him to read Brentano’s thesis in a way that brings thesemetaphysical reflections to the fore, obscuring the fact that it was Brentano’s in-tention to ground metaphysics in empirical psychology. But if, like Comte beforehim, Brentano is serious about such a project, then his own metaphysical reflec-tions on the ontological status of intentional objects must themselves be providedwith such a ground. The ungrounded and free-flowing character of these meta-physical reflections, however, reveals them to be the merely speculative sugges-tions that they surely were.57

3 . B E Y O N D T H E A N A L Y T I C A N D P H E N O M E N O L O G I C A L R E A D I N G S

I have argued that Brentano’s readers in both the analytic and phenomenologicaltraditions emphasized those aspects of his thought that were most relevant totheir own philosophical interests. Chisholm read Brentano’s thesis in a way thatdrew attention to its apparent implications for 20th century debates over the re-ducibility of the mental to the physical while downplaying or simply ignoring

53 The relationship of Brentano’s “late” theory of intentionality to his earlier theories is discussedin Chrudzimski, Intentionalitätstheorie beim frühen Brentano, ch. 7. On the related doctrines of the mem-bers of Brentano’s school, see Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy, and Robin Rollinger, Husserl’s Positionin the School of Brentano.

54 See e.g., Mauro Antonelli, Seindes, Bewußtsein, Intentionalität im Frühwerk von Franz Brentano,338–40.

55 Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 43.56 Indeed, as Chrudzimski notes, the descriptive psychological thesis of the intentionality of con-

sciousness may be met with a variety of metaphysical responses, occupying various points on the con-tinuum between positions that aim at strict faithfulness to the descriptive characterization and thosethat depart quite radically from it (Intentionalitätstheorie beim frühen Brentano, 20).

57 While Chrudzimski devotes a book-length study to the reconstruction of Brentano’s early“theory” of intentionality, even he concedes that what he is reconstructing is not a coherent theory butrather a “bundle of related but not always compatible ideas” subject to a “constant flux of modifica-tion” (Intentionalitätstheorie beim frühen Brentano, 272; my translation).

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Brentano’s distinctive methodological innovations. While both Husserl andHeidegger drew attention to these innovations, emphasizing their importancefor the founding of phenomenology, they decried the lingering“unphenomenological” elements in Brentano’s psychology. How, it might be won-dered, have Brentano’s works been able to support such widely varying interpre-tations? This question points to one of the central difficulties that more histori-cally sensitive readers of Brentano must confront. Brentano’s philosophicalinheritance is a rich one, as is evident in the range of his interests and the diversityof philosophical and empirical methods that he employed over the course of alengthy and productive career. As a consequence, it can be difficult to discern notonly the characteristic doctrines of these works, but also what Brentano’s motiva-tions were for writing them.

This problem is especially acute in the case of Brentano’s psychological works,located as they are in the middle (temporally speaking) of a broad philosophicalcorpus that is dominated by metaphysical and historical concerns. Heidegger sug-gested that Descartes had shown Brentano the way beyond the Scholastico-Aristo-telian tradition in which he had pursued his earliest philosophical inquiries.58

But as we have seen, Brentano’s interest in empirical psychology in no way repre-sented an abandonment of the metaphysical orientation he had developed in thecourse of his long engagement with this tradition. In any event, his empiricalpsychological works are by no means free from its influence: He insisted that thecentral doctrines of his psychology, the doctrines of intentionality and inner per-ception, were doctrines that had clear precedents in the work of Aristotle and theScholastics.59 It is in deference to these predecessors that Brentano spoke of hisown versions of these doctrines as merely “reviving” traditional Aristotelian orScholastic teachings in a modern context. For Brentano’s historically-minded in-terpreters the problem remains of determining what status these “Aristotelian”doctrines are supposed to have in the context of his rather modern-looking em-pirical psychology. Having been imported into this Cartesian context, are theytransformed, as the phenomenological reading suggests, into empirical psycho-logical theses (e.g., descriptive psychological claims)? Or do they instead retainthe metaphysical character they bore in their original Aristotelian framework? Ifthe former, what is the precise nature of the transformation they underwent and

58 Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, 20.59 Specifically, Brentano saw an anticipation of his intentionality thesis in Aristotle’s “doctrine of

assimilation,” according to which in both sensation and intellection the soul becomes in a sense simi-lar to or identical with the thing being sensed (i.e., it takes on the form of the thing but not its matter)(De An. 417a17, 418a3, 429a16–18, 430a14, 431b20). He also saw an anticipation of his doctrine ofinner perception in Aristotle’s claim in De An. III.2 (425b12–15) that it is through sight itself that weare aware that we are seeing (PES, I.125/88). Cf. Franz Brentano, The Psychology of Aristotle, trans. RolfGeorge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), Book II, Parts III–IV. Brentano also drewattention to similar doctrines in the work of Philo, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas (PES, I.125/88).On Brentano’s relation to Aristotle and the Scholastics see Spiegelberg, “‘Intention’ and ‘Intentional-ity’ in the Scholastics, Brentano and Husserl”; Richard Sorabji, “From Aristotle to Brentano: TheDevelopment of the Concept of Intentionality,” in Aristotle and the Later Tradition, ed. H. Blumenthaland H. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Franco Volpi, “War Brentano einAristoteliker? Zu Brentanos und Aristoteles’ Auffassung der Psychologie als Wissenschaft,” BrentanoStudien 2 (1989), 13–29.

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what relation do the new empirical psychological versions of these doctrines haveto the original Aristotelian versions? If the latter, what justification does Brentano,metatheoretician for a new empirical psychology, have for introducing such meta-physical elements into what appear to be descriptive psychological investigationsof mental phenomena?60

Similar problems arise when one attempts to understand the relationship ofthe empirical psychological works of Brentano’s middle period to his later meta-physical investigations. Brentano, as we have seen, came to abandon the claimthat any object, whether existent or non-existent, could be intended by a mentalact in favor of his “reist” view that only individual existent substances could be sointended. But what is the relationship of this metaphysical thesis of reism, and ofthe method of linguistic analysis called upon to support it, to the earlier psycho-logical project, with its reliance on descriptive and broadly empirical methods?Must we speak of a “turn” in Brentano’s thought, away from the empirical stand-point of the psychological works and back toward the more metaphysical con-cerns of his earlier works? Or was Brentano’s reism a more natural outgrowth ofhis earlier empirical psychology? These questions rest upon a set of deep tensionsin his psychological works, tensions between, e.g., Aristotelian and Cartesian ele-ments, empirical-scientific and metaphysical aims, and descriptive and theorizingapproaches. It is at least in part because of the presence of these tensions in histhought that Brentano’s interpreters have been able to read his thesis in suchdivergent ways. A more historically sensitive reading—one that incorporates whatis correct in the analytic and phenomenological readings while also addressingtheir excesses—must show how these deep tensions are to be resolved, or at leasthow the conceptual terrain they configure is to be navigated. It must also do jus-tice to the historical evidence that indicates the relatively continuous nature ofBrentano’s metaphysical interests, which as we have seen remained strong evenduring the height of his attempts to develop his psychology from an empiricalstandpoint.

We have already seen how the phenomenological reading overcomes the ana-lytic reading’s insensitivity to Brentano’s distinctive empirical methods. But, onthe negative side, phenomenologists tended to assume that Brentano’s descrip-tive psychology was merely a step “on the way” to a truly phenomenological phi-losophy. Accordingly, they noted the ways in which his psychological investiga-tions failed to achieve the levels of presuppositionlessness and freedom fromprejudice that phenomenologists demanded of their own descriptive investiga-tions. In order to appreciate better what is wrong with this way of reading Brentano’spsychological works, let us focus on one example of such a reading, specificallyHeidegger’s discussion in his lecture course, The History of the Concept of Time, ofBrentano’s contributions to the founding of phenomenology. Since it is primarilythese contributions that he is interested in discussing, Heidegger focuses his at-

60 Franco Volpi, “War Brentano ein Aristoteliker?”, defends a “Cartesian” reading. For a moreAristotelian reading, see Barry Smith’s discussion of Brentano in his Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy ofFranz Brentano, chs. 2–3. Mauro Antonelli stakes out a middle position, emphasizing Brentano’s desireto give an Aristotelian psychology a new timeliness and appeal by providing it with a psychologicalfoundation (Seindes, Bewußtsein, Intentionalität im Frühwerk von Franz Brentano, 434).

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tention on those aspects of Brentano’s psychology that are most relevant to theconcerns of the phenomenologists. Thus he notes that it was in attempting tocarry out the task of classifying mental phenomena that Brentano came closest tooperating in accordance with the fundamental imperative at the heart of phe-nomenology, the “phenomenological imperative” to proceed in accordance witha fidelity to “the things themselves.”61 Husserl and some (though arguably notall) later phenomenologists understood this imperative as calling for apresuppositionless inquiry that avoids all a priori theorizing and proceeds in ac-cordance with a strict faithfulness to the phenomena as they are actually “given”to the phenomenologist’s reflective gaze. It appears that a similar imperative guidesBrentano’s classificatory endeavors insofar as he insists that, “it is the fundamen-tal rule of classification that it should proceed from a study of the objects to beclassified [aus dem Studium der zu klassifizierenden Gegenstände] and not from somea priori construction” (PES, II.28/194). In other words, classification should re-spect the “natural affinities” displayed by the objects themselves rather than im-posing some external standard upon them (PES, II.28/194). For Heidegger, this“phenomenological” demand signaled unmistakably Brentano’s intention to pro-ceed in accordance with a version of the phenomenological imperative.

But while this imperative certainly plays a role in Brentano’s descriptive psy-chological investigations, these investigations are also constrained (and enabled)by the presence of at least two even more fundamental imperatives, imperativesthat arise out of Brentano’s deepest assumptions about the nature of science assuch. As Brentano sees it, two requirements are essential to the very nature ofscience, and thus a fortiori to his own burgeoning psychological science: (a) scien-tific investigations require classification and order, and (b) this order must not bearbitrary, but must itself be “scientific” (wissenschaftlich) (PES, II.1/177). AsBrentano applied requirement (b) in the context of his own empirical psychol-ogy, the demand that a classification of mental phenomena be scientific was, inhis eyes, equivalent to the requirement that it be useful for scientific purposes.That is to say, it must “[arrange] the objects in a manner favorable to research [ineiner der Forschung dienlichen Weise]” (PES, II.28/194, my italics). But, according toBrentano, what is useful for the purposes of a genetic psychological study of themental happens to coincide with what is “natural,” for it is of greatest use to ge-netic psychology to have in its possession a classification according to the classesinto which mental phenomena naturally separate themselves. Accordingly, thedescriptive psychologist should not bring to the classificatory task some prior stan-dard for classification but should instead look to the objects themselves (i.e., tothe “things themselves”) to find this standard. The result will be a classification inwhich those objects that are “closely related by nature” are grouped together whilethose that are “relatively distant by nature” are placed into separate categories(PES, II.28/194). And since, as Brentano argued, it is intentionality that is uniquelycharacteristic of (i.e., essential to) mental phenomena, a classification in terms ofdifferences in modes of intentionality is most “natural.” Thus Brentano arrived,presumably after a series of careful descriptive psychological investigations, at his

61 For one of Husserl’s earliest and most influential statements of the phenomenological impera-tive, zu den Sachen selbst, see his Logical Investigations, Introduction to Volume II, sec. 2.

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well-known, threefold distinction of mental phenomena into presentations, judg-ments, and feelings/emotions/willings.62 Brentano’s emphasis here on scientificutility suggests that it is ultimately a pragmatic consideration rather than a phe-nomenological one that most fundamentally drives his descriptive psychologicalstudies. He is more interested, at least at this stage of his psychological labors, infacilitating a genetic-explanatory study of the mental than in producing a phe-nomenologically adequate categorization of mental phenomena for its own sake.Indeed, it is only because of the mere fact of the coincidence of what is useful andwhat is natural in this case that a version of the phenomenological imperativecomes to play the role that it does in Brentano’s psychology.

Requirement (b) is the imperative that motivates Brentano to seek a categori-zation or characteristica universalis of the mental in the first place. This classifica-tory interest is a result of his assumption that scientific inquiry by its very naturerequires classification and order. But this assumption, and the imperative it en-genders, exert a very deep non-phenomenological influence upon his descriptivepsychology, dictating the kind of investigation of mental phenomena that he iswilling to entertain. It ensures that in probing the realm of mental phenomena,Brentano will aim to decompose and categorize the “objects” that he finds in thisrealm, in an attempt to impose order upon them in a way that renders themsuitable for genetic psychological study. But it has not been obvious to all psy-chologists that the mental is a domain for which such an analytic and categorizinganalysis is appropriate. Gestalt psychologists, for example, emphasize the irreduc-ibility of mental phenomena into atomic constituents, insisting that psychologicalwholes are unities of meaning that are, in an important sense, greater than thesum of their parts.63 Similarly, Henri Bergson’s attempts to study “the immediatedata of consciousness,” undertaken at roughly the same time as Brentano’s ownpsychological studies, revealed not wholes decomposable into parts but insteadan organic and undecomposable whole, a qualitative “duration” [durée] in whichcomponent states (if such may be spoken of at all), permeate and “melt into” oneanother in an enduring and evolving totality.64 Significantly, Brentano does makethe claim that the part/whole structure that he finds in the realm of mental phe-nomena is not one that he imposed upon it from without, but one that can befound in the phenomena themselves. Our consciousness, he insists, “does notpresent itself to our inner perception as something simple, but shows itself [zeigtsich] as being composed of many parts” (DP, 12/15, my italics, translation modi-fied). But he offers no defense of this claim. Presumably it, like any other descriptivepsychological claim, must be tested by appeal to the self-evident data of inner per-ception. It is by no means obvious, however, that psychic states are given in innerperception as the decomposable wholes that Brentano insists they are. The suspi-cion may remain that Brentano’s “discovery” of order in this realm suggests more

62 Cf. PES, Book II, secs. V–IX.63 For a clear and engaging overview of Gestalt psychology, see Morton Hunt, The Story of Psychol-

ogy (New York: Doubleday, 1993), ch. 10.64 See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L.

Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1910). This text, Bergson’s doctoral dissertation, was prepared in Parisduring the 1880’s.

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about his pre-phenomenological assumptions and scientific and practical inten-tions than it does about the “natural” character of mental phenomena themselves.

While phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger were certainly aware ofthe presence of these non-phenomenological influences upon Brentano’s em-pirical psychology, they tended to dismiss them as mere missteps on his part. Fromthe perspective of a phenomenological investigation driven by the exacting de-mands of the phenomenological imperative, these competing imperatives couldonly be regarded as impediments to the pursuit of an inquiry carried out in trueattentiveness to “the things themselves.” But to read Brentano’s project in this wayis to identify his theoretical aims with those of his phenomenological successors.In light of his own self-description (i.e., “empirical psychologist”) and his admit-ted inability to appreciate the innovations being effected in the name of “phe-nomenology” by Husserl and others, such an identification is surely unwarranted.

4 . C O N C L U S I O N

I have emphasized, in opposition to Brentano’s analytic readers, the descriptivepsychological nature of his intentionality thesis, while noting, against his phe-nomenological readers, the essential role that non-phenomenological impera-tives play in his psychology. It follows from these observations that both the stan-dard analytic objection to Brentano’s thesis, that it does not amount to an adequatetheory or analysis of intentionality, and the standard phenomenological objec-tion, that it is corrupted by non-phenomenological influences, miss the mark.Brentano’s thesis is offered as a psychological criterion for distinguishing the classof mental phenomena from the class of physical phenomena. As such, it servesthe further descriptive project of indicating the “natural” feature of mental phe-nomena (their intentional containment of an object) according to which theymay be subject to “scientific” categorization. Both of these descriptive psychologi-cal tasks are pursued by Brentano, at least initially, in service of his more generalquest to found a new empirical psychology. Because this is his overriding aim, hisdescriptive psychological labors are driven as much by considerations of scientificutility as by the phenomenological aim to remain true to the things themselves.Further, because Brentano envisioned his psychology as one day providing a groundfor metaphysics, his preliminary metaphysical reflections on the status of the in-tentional relation must be admitted to be no more than speculative suggestions.

To claim that Brentano’s analytic and phenomenological critics have missedthe point of his descriptive analyses is not, however, to suggest that Brentano’sthesis is immune to all criticism. Three broad lines of criticism remain especiallyeffective against it. For one, against the claim that all mental states are character-ized by intentional reference to an object, it is a trenchant criticism to reply thatthere are mental phenomena for which such a descriptive characterization is sim-ply false. Philosophers in both the analytic and phenomenological traditions haveoffered versions of this criticism, the most famous of these perhaps being Husserl’sclaim in the Logical Investigations that some sensory phenomena fail to be “inten-tional” in the sense Brentano intends.65 A second and more general form of criti-

65 Cf. Husserl, Logical Investigations, Fifth Investigation, ch. 2.

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cism is suggested by Husserl’s charge in the fifth of his Logical Investigations that nomental phenomenon is correctly described as intentional in Brentano’s sense ofthe term (i.e., as “containing” its intended object as a part within a whole).66

According to Husserl, careful phenomenological examination reveals that theintentional object is transcendent to the act rather than contained in it as a real(reel) component. Husserl’s claim thus indirectly suggests the inadequacy ofBrentano’s mereological apparatus as applied to the task of descriptively charac-terizing the relationship of mental acts to their intended objects. But this criti-cism suggests a third and even more radical critique that may be directed atBrentano’s descriptive psychology as whole. This criticism attacks the mereologicalapparatus employed by the descriptive psychologist in a more general way, argu-ing that the apparatus of part and whole is in general inadequate to the analytic-descriptive task that Brentano sets out for it. Thus, for example, it might be ar-gued on descriptive or phenomenological grounds that the apparatus is too clumsyor coarse-grained to capture the subtleties of mental phenomena as they are re-vealed by inner perception. Or, even more generally, it might be suggested, asabove, that mental phenomena do not “give themselves” as wholes made up ofparts in the first place, but instead as organic and undecomposable wholes. Whileall three of these objections represent challenges to the phenomenological adequacyof Brentano’s descriptive psychological characterizations of mental phenomena,they do so in a way that recognizes Brentano’s intention to subordinate his de-scriptive studies to the practical aim of producing a classification useful for scien-tific purposes.

The overall picture of Brentano that emerges from this examination of hisintentionality thesis is that of an empirical psychologist who was, as he himselfindicated, devoted to the task of attaining a core of truths capable of serving asthe basis for a unified psychological science (PES, I.1/xxvii). In opposition to theprevalent eclecticism and factionalism of late nineteenth century psychology, thisunified psychology was to apply an agreed-upon method to an agreed-upon do-main of objects. The task of winning this domain of objects fell to the descriptivepsychological branch of Brentano’s new empirical psychology. The task was to becarried out through the rigorous separating, distinguishing, and categorizing ofmental phenomena, in an attempt to give order to an initially disordered realm.The deepest assumptions that Brentano made in proposing and carrying out sucha task were the assumption that the categorization in question must be achievedin a way that is useful for the purposes of a genetic psychology, and, even moredeeply, the assumption that such a categorization is appropriate or even possiblein the first place. A version of the phenomenological imperative entered into thispsychology only secondarily, as a means for ensuring the production of a scientifi-cally useful categorization, on the assumption that the most useful such categori-zation is the one that is most “natural.”

On this reading of his psychological project, Brentano was neither an earlyanalytic philosopher of mind nor a proto-phenomenologist, but instead a meta-scientist and pioneering empirical psychologist, intent upon elevating psychology

66 Husserl, Logical Investigations, Fifth Investigation, ch. 2.

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from its prescientific status and placing it upon the firm path of what ThomasKuhn called “normal science.”67 Further, on this reading Brentano was far more aCartesian than an Aristotelian, despite his claims in PES to have “revived” tradi-tional ancient and medieval metaphysical doctrines. While Brentano remainedcommitted to rescuing these traditional doctrines for contemporary use, withinthe context of his psychology they took the form of descriptive psychological the-ses rather than metaphysical or philosophical claims. Finally, on the present read-ing we must be willing to admit that there are significant discontinuities betweenthe empirical psychological works of Brentano’s “Vienna years” and the meta-physical and ontological studies of both his earlier and later periods. However,these discontinuities are not evidence of Brentano’s temporary abandonment ofmetaphysics in favor of empirical psychology. As Carl Stumpf once said of Brentano,“metaphysics was the beginning and end of his thought.”68 In Brentano’s middleperiod, however, these metaphysical concerns were temporarily set aside in theinterest of providing them with a rigorous empirical psychological grounding. Aseven Stumpf ultimately conceded, Brentano’s constant and deep metaphysicalinterests “would not keep psychology from at times assuming a place in the fore-ground of his work, and this is in fact what happened.”69

67 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1996).

68 Stumpf, “Reminiscences of Franz Brentano” in The Philosophy of Brentano, ed. L. McAlister (Lon-don: Duckworth, 1976), 16.

69 Stumpf, “Reminiscences of Franz Brentano,” 16. Compare Mauro Antonelli: “There is only asingle Brentano, who argues from the point of view of two different perspectives: ontological-meta-physical and psychological. Both approaches may be shown to be diachronically present, though withvarying priority, over the entire course of the development of his thought” (Seindes, Bewußtsein,Intentionalität im Frühwerk von Franz Brentano, 29; my translation).

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brentano's intentionality thesis: beyond the analytic and phenomenological readings

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