BRENTANO, FRANZ. – Philosopher, born at Marienberg near Boppard on the Rhine on 16 January 1838 to a Catholic family of Italian origin, died in Zurich, 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 surrounding papal infallibility, he left the Church and lived outside every confession, while always preserving a living faith in God. Having moved to the University of Vienna, he left teaching because of the worsening of a progressive blindness and withdrew to Florence, from which he was forced into exile when Italy declared war on Austria.
B. was a teacher of exceptional effectiveness, who caused throngs of students to gather around his chair. From his ecclesiastical formation he drew and preserved a strong attachment to Aristotelianism, which he had the opportunity to deepen under the guidance of Adolfo Trendelenburg in Berlin. His early works of Aristotelian exegesis are still valuable today: Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (Freiburg im Breisgau 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. defended the Thomistic interpretation with acuity and fervour.
Within theoretical philosophy, rather than constructing a system, B. limited himself to the analysis of certain fundamental problems, whose structure he reconstructed and whose requirements he explored in depth through the examination and criticism of earlier solutions, dwelling preferably on problems of knowledge. In an age dominated by Comtean positivism, with its successes in the experimental sciences, he set himself the task of giving philosophy the methodological rigour and evidential character of its conclusions enjoyed by science: a task he explained in his major work, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1st ed., Leipzig 1874, for Part I). In it, setting aside purely metaphysical questions concerning the nature of the soul and its faculties, B. defined psychology as the “science of psychic phenomena” and assigned to it as its method phenomenological analysis, or 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 properties which B., explicitly referring to the Scholastics, designated by the term “intentionality” (v.), the intentional inexistence of an object, insofar as such an act always expresses a “relation to an object.” Intentionality is common both to acts of knowing and to those of desiring and willing (against Hamilton, who restricted it to the former): in representation something is represented; in judgment something is admitted or rejected; in love something is loved, in hatred something is hated, in desire something is desired. That which is known, loved, etc., is called the primary object, whereas the act of knowing, loving, etc., is the secondary object. As regards the structure of the act, B. distinguished a perceiving modo recto, which is consciousness of the act and is direct and immediate, from a perceiving modo obliquo, which concerns the relation to the content to which the observable variations of space and time refer. Consequently, B. denied the immediate perception of the external world and admitted the possibility of solipsism. Similar oscillations can be found in his positions on ethical, metaphysical, and religious problems, between attachment to ancient wisdom and the temptation of modern solutions, into which his faith too sank.
B.’s work stimulated original research by his disciples in every field of philosophy, bringing about a genuine renewal of German culture: Chr. von Ehrenfels, A. Meinong, A. Marty, and St. Witasek developed the theory of “Gestaltqualität”; C. Stumpf, his favourite pupil, had as assistants W. Köhler and K. Koffka, who, together with M. Wertheimer, constructed the “Gestalttheorie,” which revolutionized contemporary psychology; E. Husserl turned to “pure,” or eidetic, phenomenology. In Italy, B.’s influence is evident in the spiritualism of F. De Sarlo (v.).