Brentano Franz (1838–1917), German philosopher, one of the most intellectually influential and personally charismatic of his time. He is known especially for his distinction between psychological and physical phenomena on the basis of intentionality or internal object-directedness of thought, his revival of Aristotelianism and empirical methods in philosophy and psychology, and his value theory and ethics supported by the concept of correct pro- and anti-emotions or love and hate attitudes. Brentano made noted contributions to the theory of metaphysical categories, phenomenology, epistemology, syllogistic logic, and philosophy of religion. His teaching made a profound impact on his students in Würzburg and Vienna, many of whom became internationally respected thinkers in their fields, including Meinong, Husserl, Twardowski, Christian von Ehrenfels, Anton Marty, and Freud. Brentano began his study of philosophy at the Aschaffenburg Royal Bavarian Gymnasium; in 1856–58 he attended the universities of Munich and Würzburg, and then enrolled at the University of Berlin, where he undertook his first investigations of Aristotle’s metaphysics under the supervision of F. A. Trendelenburg. In 1859– 60, he attended the Academy in Münster, reading intensively in the medieval Aristotelians; in 1862 he received the doctorate in philosophy in absentia from the University of Tübingen. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1864, and was later involved in a controversy over the doctrine of papal infallibility, eventually leaving the church in 1873. He taught first as Privatdozent in the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Würzburg (1866–74), and then accepted a professorship at the University of Vienna. In 1880 he decided to marry, temporarily resigning his position to acquire Saxon citizenship, in order to avoid legal difficulties in Austria, where marriages of former priests were not officially recognized. Brentano was promised restoration of his position after his circumvention of these restrictions, but although he was later reinstated as lecturer, his appeals for reappointment as professor were answered only with delay and equivocation. He left Vienna in 1895, retiring to Italy, his family’s country of origin. At last he moved to Zürich, Switzerland, shortly before Italy entered World War I. Here he remained active both in philosophy and psychology, despite his ensuing blindness, writing and revising numerous books and articles, frequently meeting with former students and colleagues, and maintaining an extensive philosophical-literary correspondence, until his death. In Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (‘Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint,’ 1874), Brentano argued that intentionality is the mark of the mental, that every psychological experience contains an intended object – also called an intentional object – which the thought is about or toward which the thought is directed. Thus, in desire, something is desired. According to the immanent intentionality thesis, this means that the desired object is literally contained within the psychological experience of desire. Brentano claims that this is uniquely true of mental as opposed to physical or non-psychological phenomena, so that the intentionality of the psychological distinguishes mental from physical states. The immanent intentionality thesis provides a framework in which Brentano identifies three categories of psychological phenomena: thoughts (Vorstellungen), judgments, and emotive phenomena. He further maintains that every thought is also self-consciously reflected back onto itself as a secondary intended object in what he called the eigentümliche Verfleckung.
From 1905 through 1911, with the publication in that year of Von der Klassifikation der psychischen Phänomene, Brentano gradually abandoned the immanent intentionality thesis in favor of his later philosophy of reism, according to which only individuals exist, excluding putative nonexistent irrealia, such as lacks, absences, and mere possibilities. In the meantime, his students Twardowski, Meinong, and Husserl, reacting negatively to the idealism, psychologism, and related philosophical problems apparent in the early immanent intentionality thesis, developed alternative non-immanence approaches to intentionality, leading, in the case of Twardowski and Meinong and his students in the Graz school of phenomenological psychology, to the construction of Gegenstandstheorie, the theory of (transcendent existent and nonexistent intended) objects, and to Husserl’s later transcendental phenomenology. The intentionality of the mental in Brentano’s revival of the medieval Aristotelian doctrine is one of his most important contributions to contemporary non-mechanistic theories of mind, meaning, and expression. Brentano’s immanent intentionality thesis was, however, rejected by philosophers who otherwise agreed with his underlying claim that thought is essentially object-directed.
Brentano’s value theory (Werttheorie) offers a pluralistic account of value, permitting many different kinds of things to be valuable – although, in keeping with his later reism, he denies the existence of an abstract realm of values. Intrinsic value is objective rather than subjective, in the sense that he believes the pro- and anti-emotions we may have toward an act or situation are objectively correct if they present themselves to emotional preference with the same apodicity or unquestionable sense of rightness as other selfevident matters of non-ethical judgment. Among the controversial consequences of Brentano’s value theory is the conclusion that there can be no such thing as absolute evil. The implication follows from Brentano’s observation, first, that evil requires evil consciousness, and that consciousness of any kind, even the worst imaginable malice or malevolent ill will, is (considered merely as consciousness) intrinsically good. This means that necessarily there is always a mixture of intrinsic good even in the most malicious possible states of mind, by virtue alone of being consciously experienced, so that pure evil never obtains. Brentano’s value theory admits of no defense against those who happen not to share the same ‘correct’ emotional attitudes toward the situations he describes. If it is objected that to another person’s emotional preferences only good consciousness is intrinsically good, while infinitely bad consciousness despite being a state of consciousness appears instead to contain no intrinsic good and is absolutely evil, there is no recourse within Brentano’s ethics except to acknowledge that this contrary emotive attitude toward infinitely bad consciousness may also be correct, even though it contradicts his evaluations. Brentano’s empirical psychology and articulation of the intentionality thesis, his moral philosophy and value theory, his investigations of Aristotle’s metaphysics at a time when Aristotelian realism was little appreciated in the prevailing climate of post-Kantian idealism, his epistemic theory of evident judgment, his suggestions for the reform of syllogistic logic, his treatment of the principle of sufficient reason and existence of God, his interpretation of a fourstage cycle of successive trends in the history of philosophy, together with his teaching and personal moral example, continue to inspire a variety of divergent philosophical traditions. See also ARISTOTLE , HUSSERL , INTENTION — ALITY , MEINONG , PHENOMENOLOGY , VALU. D.J.