BRENTANO, FRANZ. - Philosopher, b. at Marienberg near Boppard on the Rhine on 16 January 1838 into a Catholic family of Italian origin, d. at Zurich in Switzerland on 17 March 1917. Ordained a priest in 1864, he obtained his habilitation at the University of Würzburg in 1866; in 1873, following the controversies over papal infallibility, he left the Church and lived outside any confession but always preserving a lively faith in God. Having moved to the University of Vienna, because of the worsening of a progressive blindness he gave up teaching and retired to Florence, from which he had to go into exile when Italy declared war on Austria.
B. was a teacher of exceptional effectiveness, who drew crowds of students around his chair. From his ecclesiastical formation he drew and preserved a strong attachment to Aristotelianism, which he had the opportunity to study in depth at the school of Adolf Trendelenburg in Berlin. His early works of Aristotelian exegesis are still valuable today: Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (Freiburg im Br. 1862); Die Psychologie des Aristoteles insbesondere seine Lehre vom NOTRE
ΠΟΙΗΤΙΚΟΣ (Mainz 1867); Aristoteles' Lehre vom Ursprung des menschlichen Geistes (Leipzig 1911): a harsh and vigorous critique of Zeller, as a new edition of the earlier Über den Creationismus des Aristoteles (Vienna 1882); Aristoteles und seine Weltanschauung (Leipzig 1911). In the controversy over the nature, origin and unity of the intellect in man, B. defends the Thomist interpretation with acumen and warmth.
In the field of theoretical philosophy, rather than constructing a system, B. limited himself to the analysis of certain fundamental problems, whose fabric he reconstructed and whose demands he laid bare through the examination and criticism of previous solutions, dwelling by preference on the problems of knowledge. In an age dominated by Comtean positivism with its successes in the experimental sciences, he set out to give philosophy the rigor of method and the evidence of conclusions that science enjoys: a task he explained in his major work, the Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1st ed., Leipzig 1874, for part 1). In it, setting aside purely metaphysical questions about the nature of the soul and its faculties, B. defined psychology as the «science of psychic phenomena» and assigned it as its method phenomenological analysis, that is, the description of the acts and functions of consciousness; hence descriptive psychology or «phenomenological psychognosy». The «psychic» phenomenon is the conscious act and is distinguished from the «physical» by the properties that B., expressly appealing to the Scholastics, designates with the term «intentionality» (v.), the intentional inexistence of an object, inasmuch as such an act always expresses a «relation to an object». Intentionality is common to the acts of knowing as well as to those of desiring and willing (against Hamilton, who limited it to the former): in representation something is represented, in judgment something is admitted or rejected, in love something is loved, in hatred hated, in desire something is desired. What is known, loved, etc. is called the primary object, while the act of knowing, loving, etc. is called the secondary object. As for the structure of the act, B. distinguished a perceiving «modo recto», which is the direct and immediate consciousness of the act, and a perceiving «modo obliquo», which concerns the relation to the content to which the observable variations of space and time refer. Hence B. denied the immediate perception of the external world and admitted the possibility of solipsism. Similar oscillations are found in his positions on ethical, metaphysical and religious problems, between his attachment to ancient wisdom and the temptation of modern solutions, in which his faith too foundered.
B.'s work was a stimulus for original research on the part of his disciples in all fields of philosophy, bringing about a true renewal of German culture: Chr. von Ehrenfels, A. Meinong, A. Marty, St. Witasek elaborated the theory of «Gestaltqualität»; his favorite pupil C. Stumpf had as assistants W. Köhler and K. Koffka, who together with M. Wertheimer were the builders of the «Gestalttheorie» that has revolutionized contemporary psychology; E. Husserl turned to «pure» or eidetic «phenomenology». In Italy B.'s influence is visible in the spiritualism of F. De Sarlo (v.).
Bibliography7 works
Cornelio Fabro