Franz Brentano

Franz Brentano (1838-1917) was a German philosopher and psychologist who had been a Catholic priest before leaving the priesthood. He belongs to the tradition of scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy, which he reinterpreted in an independent way. His significance lies in having brought the concept of intentionality back into contemporary philosophy, where it became central to the phenomenology that followed.

He was born at Kloster Marienberg, near Boppard, in the Rhineland of Prussia. He was the brother of the economist Lujo Brentano and the nephew of the poet Clemens Brentano and of Bettina von Arnim. He studied philosophy and theology in Munich, Würzburg, Berlin, where he worked with Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, and Münster. From an early age he showed a special interest in Aristotle. He completed his doctorate in 1862 with a dissertation on the many senses of being in Aristotle and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1864.

His break with the Church came after the First Vatican Council declared papal infallibility a dogma. In 1873 he gave up the priesthood and his post at Würzburg. He taught at the University of Vienna from 1874 to 1895 and trained a generation of students there, among them Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Carl Stumpf, Alexius Meinong, Kazimierz Twardowski and Christian von Ehrenfels. In 1880, to marry, he had to give up his Austrian citizenship and his professorship, since Austrian law did not allow former priests to marry; he remained at the university only as a private lecturer.

His major work, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), argues that what sets mental phenomena apart from physical ones is intentionality: every mental act is directed at an object, even when that object does not exist in reality. Brentano saw the mind not as a set of isolated images but as an activity through which the organism engages with the world. He distinguished genetic psychology, an empirical study from the third-person view, from descriptive psychology, which describes consciousness from the first-person view. He also held that external perception yields only hypotheses, while inner perception, our certainty that we hear or see, is secure; he later revised this position.

His influence was wide. His ideas shaped Husserl's phenomenology, and through it Heidegger, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty and existentialism. Through Ehrenfels they also fed into Gestalt psychology, and his student Freud was shaped by his teaching in Vienna.