Franz Brentano: biography of this German philosopher and psychologist

Franz Brentano is considered one of the key figures in the beginnings of tla psychology and as we understand it today. Although we owe not everything that is current behavioral science to him, it is true that he is one of the first to approach it from an empirical point of view.

Born in a highly cultured and intellectually active environment, it was a matter of time before Brentano felt interest and devotion to philosophy, psychology and theology, becoming qualified as priest.

Today we are going to discover what happened to the life of this author and researcher through a biography of Franz Brentano, and we will talk about his philosophy and his most remarkable works.

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Short biography of Franz Brentano

Franz Brentano was a German philosopher, psychologist and priest. He was a disciple of Bernard Bolzano, defended the thesis of intentionality as a characteristic feature of psychological phenomena, giving rise to what would later become known as the Austrian school of act psychology.

This German philosopher set a trend in his time and in his disciples, who have come to be called "the school of Brentano", being among them Edmund husserl and Sigmund Freud.

Early years and training

Full name Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano, born in Marienberg, now Germany, on January 16, 1838. Raised in an environment of literati, Franz Brentano already showed intellectual interest, soon heading down the path of studies and feeling a special predilection for philosophy.

His family was full of intellectuals: he was the son of Christian Brentano (writer), the brother of Lujo Brentano (economist and social reformer), and the nephew of Clemens Brentano (poet and novelist) and Bettina von Armin (writer and novelist), and of Gunda and Friedrich von Savigny (jurist and historian).

The young Franz studied philosophy at the universities of Munich, Würzburg, Berlin (together with Adolf Trendelenburg) and Münster. Brentano showed interest in Aristotle and scholastic philosophy, the Greek being the subject of his doctoral thesis in 1862 under the title of Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Serenden nach Aristoteles ("On the multiple signification of being according to Aristotle"). His thesis reviewer was Franz Jakob Clemens.

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Priestly crisis

Being sincerely and intensely Catholic, he began to study theology, entering the seminary in Munich and, later, in Würzburg.. He would be ordained a Catholic priest on August 6, 1864, his ethical-religious ideal being that of a liberal Catholicism. In addition, he would combine this with university teaching, defending his thesis in 1966 Die Psychologie des Aristoteles, insbesondere seine Lehre vom Nous Poietikos ("The Psychology of Aristotle, in Particular his Doctrine of Active Intellect ").

Between the years 1870 and 1873, Franz Brentano he became involved in the debate on papal infallibility, which considers what the Pope says as a truth of faith and must be obeyed unconditionally. Brentano expressed his most emphatic opposition to such dogma and, because of the rigid position adopted by the Church in 1870 (Vatican Council I), would live a deep and bitter crisis of conscience that would culminate three years later with the definitive abandonment of habit.

However, his abandonment of this profession did not mean leaving behind his deepest religious convictions. Proof of this is the fact that he spoke about the existence of God as a recurring theme in his lectures at the universities of Würzburg and Vienna, and He always expressed his sincere faith and interest in the Church, although he disagreed with the papal dogma.

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Psychology from the empirical point of view

The year 1874 arrived and the edition of his masterpiece was published: “Psychology from the empirical point of view”. This is a work whose theoretical core Brentano would expose years later in his work "Classification of psychic phenomena" (1911). Knowledgeable in depth of the Aristotelian point of view, in the work he classifies psychic phenomena according to the different way in which they refer to the object.

In his philosophical and psychological point of view, Brentano accepts the division into three classes: representations, judgments and affective relationships. She was careful to defend this distinction particularly against all thinkers who did not want to see any real difference between the concepts of "representation" and "judgment." By "representation", Brentano means to be present in consciousness; while "judgment" would be to have the object of representation as true or false.

At that time, it was widely held that the trial consists of bringing together or separating in the field of representations, that is, that the judgment is the action of putting in relation two objects. This idea is criticized by Brentano, believing that the meeting of the subject and the predicate is not a necessary requirement to exercise a judgment. In order to prove this, she reduces categorical statements to existential propositions.

For him, the categorical proposition "all men are mortal" had the same logic as the existential proposition "there is no immortal man." Although he insisted on the necessary unity of all psychic phenomena of the human mind, Brentano assigned the first place to the representations, the second to the trials and the third to the feeling-will, demonstrating contrary to the voluntaristic tendency of the psychology of his time.

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Bittersweet years

From 1874 to 1895 he taught at the University of Vienna, at that time an eminent educational center in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It was the happiest and most fruitful period of his teaching, having among his students figures so relevant to the history of psychology and philosophy. such as Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Kazimierz Twardowski, Rudolf Steiner, Alexius Meinong, Tomáš Masaryk and Christian von Ehrenfels.

Despite having started his career as a normal and regular teacher, he was forced to quit teaching and also renounce Austrian citizenship in 1880 in order to marry Ida Lieben.

The reason for this was that the Austrian-Hungarian law at that time denied marriage to those who had worked as priests, even after having renounced the priesthood. However, he was allowed to stay at the university, but he could only work as a “Privatdozent”, that is, a private tutor.

Last years and death

After his wife Ida died in 1894, Franz Brentano retired the following year and he would decide to be absent from Austria forever, not without dedicating a bittersweet goodbye to his work "My Last Vows for Austria" (1895).

In 1896 he moved to Florence, where he would marry his second wife, Emilie Ruprecht. in 1897. In Italy he joined the group of Giovanni Papini, Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni in the magazine “Leonardo”.

His last years were spent in Zurich, city to which he moved with the outbreak of the First World War. He would die in the Swiss city on March 17, 1917 at the age of 79.

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Philosophy of Franz Brentano

The publication of "Psychology from the empirical point of view" coincided with the publication of the "Fundamentals of Physiological Psychology" of Wilhelm Wundt, influenced by Emmanuel Kant. The works of Brentano and those of Wundt are considered as the birth of the "Psychology of consciousness" through observation of experience. Despite background Kantian influences, Brentano investigated metaphysical questions through a logical-linguistic analysis, thereby distinguishing himself from both English empiricists and Kantianism academic.

Brentano's studies in the field of psychology introduced the concept of "intentionality", an idea that would have a direct influence on his pupil Husserl.

This term refers to the phenomena of consciousness are distinguished by having a content, that is, refer to some object. He also defined "intentional existence", putting for example colors and sounds that, although they would not have a palpable "object", were stimuli that existed.

Brentano considered that the mind is composed of mental acts, which are directed to objects with some meaning external to the mind. For him, the mind was not a psychological world connected by mere chance to reality, but the means through which our body can actively capture the reality that surrounds us. His "Psychology of the act", turned into phenomenology, was a great boost to Cognitive Psychology by describing consciousness instead of analyzing it and dividing it into parts.

The transcendental phenomenology would end up taking shape with Husserl, creator of the phenomenological method, in addition of Max Scheler who would extend this current to the field of ethics and values ​​as its objects intentional. Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty would also receive influences from the philosophy of Brentano, and even the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre I would borrow the odd idea from the German thinker.