Franz Brentano: biography of this German philosopher and psychologist.

A summary of the life of Franz Brentano, a key researcher in the emergence of psychology.

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

Born into a highly cultured and intellectually active environment, it was only a matter of time before Brentano felt an interest and devotion for philosophy, psychology and theology, becoming a qualified priest.

Today we are going to discover what became of the life of this author and researcher through a biography of Franz Brentanoand we will talk about his philosophy and his most outstanding works.

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 be known as the Austrian school of the psychology of the act..

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

Early years and training

Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano, full name Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano, was born in Marienberg, now Germany, on January 16, 1838.. Raised in an environment of literary people, Franz Brentano already showed intellectual interest, taking very early on 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 Trendelen (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 Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles ("On the manifold significance of being according to Aristotle"). The reviewer of his thesis was Franz Jakob Clemens.

Priestly crisis

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

Between the years 1870 and 1873, Franz Brentano was involved in the debate about papal infallibilitywhich considers what the Pope says as a truth of faith and must be obeyed unconditionally. Brentano manifested his most emphatic opposition to such dogma and, because of the rigid position adopted by the Church in 1870 (Vatican Council I), he would experience a deep and bitter crisis of conscience that would culminate three years later with the definitive abandonment of the 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 Wurzburg and Vienna, and always manifested his sincere faith in and interest in the Church, even though he disagreed with regard to papal dogma..

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". It is a work whose theoretical core Brentano would expose years later in his work "Classification of psychic phenomena" (1911). A connoisseur in depth of the Aristotelian point of view, in this work he classifies psychic phenomena according to the different ways 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 relations. He was particularly concerned to defend this distinction against all those 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 consider the object of the representation as true or false.

At that time, it was widely held that judgment consisted in bringing together or separating in the field of representations, that is, that judgment is the action of putting two objects in relation to each other. This idea is criticized by Brentano, taking the view that the bringing together of subject and predicate is not a necessary requirement for exercising judgment.. In order to prove this, he 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". While insisting on the necessary unity of all psychic phenomena of the human mind, Brentano assigned the first place to representations, the second to judgments and the third to feeling-will, This was contrary to the voluntaristic tendency of the psychology of his time..

Bittersweet years

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

It was the happiest and most fruitful period of his teaching, having among his students such relevant figures for the history of psychology and philosophy 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, regular teacher, he was forced to give up teaching and also to renounce Austrian citizenship in 1880 in order to marry Ida Lieben.

The reason for this was that the law of Austria-Hungary at the time denied marriage to those who had worked as priests, even if they had renounced the priesthood. Nevertheless, he was allowed to remain at the university, but could only work as a "Privatdozent", i.e. private tutor.

Final years and death

After the death of his wife Ida in 1894, Franz Brentano retired the following year and decided to retire for good. and decided to leave Austria for good, but not without bidding her a bittersweet farewell in his work "My Last Vows for Austria" (1895).

In 1896 he moved to Florence, where he married his second wife, Emilie Ruprecht, in 1897. 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 ZurichHe moved to Zurich with the outbreak of the First World War. He died in the Helvetic city on March 17, 1917 at the age of 79.

Philosophy of Franz Brentano

The publication of "Psychology from the empirical point of view" coincided with the publication of Wilhelm Wundt's "Fundamentals of Physiological Psychology", influenced by Immanuel Kant. Brentano's and Wundt's works are considered to be the birth of the "Psychology of Consciousness". through the observation of experience. Despite the Kantian influences in the background, Brentano investigated metaphysical questions by means of a logical-linguistic analysis, thus distinguishing himself from both the English empiricists and academic Kantianism.

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 fact that the phenomena of the consciousness are distinguished by the fact that they possess a content, i.e., make reference to some object.that is, to refer to some object. He also defined "intentional existence", giving as examples colors and sounds which, although they would not have a palpable "object", were stimuli that existed.

Brentano considered that the mind is composed in 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 medium through which our organism can actively grasp the reality around us.. His "Psychology of the act", converted into phenomenology, gave a great impulse to Cognitive Psychology by describing consciousness instead of analyzing it and dividing it into parts.

Transcendental phenomenology would eventually take shape with Husserl, creator of the phenomenological method, as well as Max Scheler who would extend this current to the field of ethics and values as its intentional objects. Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty would also be influenced by Brentano's philosophy, and even Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism would borrow some ideas from the German thinker.