Mark Textor

It is well known that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Brentano school interacted fruitfully with early analytic philosophy: the Russell-Meinong debate is a paradigm example of this interaction. But Brentanians also engaged with other schools of philosophy. In his article “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie” (1892) Stumpf took on two opponents: Kant and the leading neo-Kantians – in his terminology ‘criticists’ – as well as the so-called ‘psychologists’. The former want to do epistemology independently of psychology, the latter reduce epistemology to psychology. Both, according to Stumpf, are wrong. In developing his argument, he expounds and clarifies central aspects of his own philosophy. “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie” is therefore, among other things, an introduction to main themes in Stumpf's work. See Mark Textor (2020) Stumpf between criticism and psychologism: introducing “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 28:6, 1172-1180, for an introductory overview.

Common sense takes the physical world to be populated by mind-independent particulars. Why and with what right do we hold this view? Early phenomenologists argue that the common sense view is our natural starting point because we experience objects as mind-independent. While it seems unsurprising that one can perceive an object being red or square, the claim that one can experience an object as mind-independent is controversial. In this paper I will articulate and defend the claim that we can experience mind-independence by mainly drawing on the work of the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker who, in turn, built on Husserl’s work. In the development of this claim the notion of a limit – either a maximum or minimum – of perception will play an important role.

Moritz Schlick’s work shaped Logical Empiricism and thereby an important part of philosophy in the first half of the 20th century. A continuous thread that runs through his work is a philosophical diagnosis of the ‘great errors in philosophy’: philosophers assume that there is intuitive knowledge/knowledge by acquaintance. Yet acquaintance, it is not knowledge, but an evaluative attitude. In this paper I will reconstruct Schlick’s arguments for this conclusion in the light of his early practical philosophy and his reading of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea. Having the historical roots of Schlick’s position in view will put us in a position to explore and question its presuppositions.

Current work on first-person thought takes its distinctive feature to be epistemological. First-person thinking is non-observational and immune to errors to which other varieties of thought about us are open. In contrast, the nineteenth century philosopher Hermann Lotze (1817-81) put the distinctive concern we have for the object of first-person thought at the center of his account. His arguments suggest that first-person thought is essentially evaluative. In this paper I will reconstruct and defend the core of Lotze’s view of self-consciousness.

Common sense takes the physical world to be populated by mind-independent particulars. Why and with what right do we hold this view? Early phenomenologists argue that the common sense view is our natural starting point because we experience objects as mind-independent. While it seems unsurprising that one can perceive an object being red or square, the claim that one can experience an object as mind-independent is controversial. In this paper I will articulate and defend the claim that we can experience mind-independence by mainly drawing on the work of the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker who, in turn, built on Husserl’s work. In the development of this claim the notion of a limit – either a maximum or minimum – of perception will play an important role.

We argue against the dominant view in the literature that concepts are modulated in lexical modulation. We also argue against the alternative view that ‘grab bags’ of information that don’t determine extensions are the starting point for lexical modulation. In response to the problems with these views we outline a new model for lexical modulation that dispenses with the assumption that there is a standing meaning of a general term that is modified in the cases under consideration. In applying general terms we intend to conform with our linguistic ancestors and in doing so we take facts about the referents of these terms for granted. In cases of lexical modulation we become aware of facts we took for granted and we need to change the facts we take for granted in order to see ourselves as continuing in a practice. These changes result in utterances of the general term referring to different properties. In general, concepts are neither the starting point for lexical modulation nor the standing meanings of words.

Although an important part of the origins of analytic philosophy can be traced back to philosophy in Austria in the first part of the twentieth century, remarkably little is known about the specific contribution made by Austrian philosophy and philosophers. In The Austrian Contribution to Analytic Philosophy , prominent analytic philosophers take a fresh look at the roots of analytic philosophy in the thought of influential but often overlooked Austrian philosophers including Brentano, Meinong, Bolzano, Husserl, and Witasek. The contributors to this volume investigate central topics in theoretical philosophy such as intentionality, consciousness, memory, attributes, and truth as well as political philosophy and aesthetics. This original collection will be of interest to anyone studying the origins of analytic philosophy as well as contemporary debates in philosophy of language, metaphysics and mind

Mark Textor presents a critical study of the work of Franz Brentano, one of the most important thinkers of the nineteenth century. His work has influenced analytic philosophers like Russell as well as phenomenologists like Husserl and Sartre, and continues to shape debates in the philosophy of mind. Brentano made intentionality a central topic in the philosophy of mind by proposing that 'directedness' is the distinctive feature of the mental. The first part of the book investigates Brentano's intentionalism as well as attempts to improve or develop it. Textor argues that there is no plausible version of this doctrine, and rejects it in favour of a mark of the mental proposed by Brentano's student Husserl: mental phenomena have no appearances. The second part of the book develops and defends Brentano's view about the structure of perceptual awareness. Awareness of a mental activity and this mental activity are not distinct mental acts, the first representing the second. They are one and the same activity that has several objects. Textor shows that Brentano held that intentionality is plural - directedness is directedness on some objects - and shows how the plural conception solves thorny problems. The third part of the book is devoted to Brentano's view of pleasure and pain. Textor draws out parallels between enjoying an activity and awareness of it and argues that enjoying an activity and the activity enjoyed are not distinct. The final part of the book extends the plural view to the conscious mental life of a thinker at a time (the unity of synchronic consciousness): it is one mental act with many objects.

Brentano's Thesis that intentionality is the mark of the mental is central to analytic philosophy of mind as well as phenomenology. The contemporary discussion assumes that it is a formulation of an analytic definition of the mental. I argue that this assumption is mistaken. According to Brentano, many philosophical concepts can only be elucidated by perceiving their instances because these concepts are abstracted from perception. The concept of the mental is one of these concepts. We need to understand Brentano's Thesis accordingly: It is a piece of advice on how to become introspectively aware of the distinctive feature of mental phenomena. On this understanding of Brentano's Thesis standard objections to it no longer arise.

Der zweite Band der Reihe Philosophische Forschung spannt zwei Kerngebiete der Analytischen Philosophie zusammen: die Semantik und die Ontologie. Was sind die Grundbausteine unserer Ontologie? Wie beziehen wir uns sprachlich bzw. geistig auf sie? Diese und weitere Fragen werden von international renommierten Philosophen aus historischer und systematischer Perspektivediskutiert. Die Beiträge sind in Deutsch und English verfasst. Sie stammen von Christian Beyer, Johannes Brandl, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Dorothea Frede, Rolf George, Gerd Graßhoff, Peter Hacker, Andreas Kemmerling, Edgar Morscher, Kevin Mulligan, Rolf Puster, Richard Schantz, Benjamin Schnieder, Oliver Scholz, Severin Schröder, Peter Simons, Thomas Spitzley, Markus Stepanians, Ralf Stoecker und Daniel von Wachter.

According to Frege, judgement is the ‘logically primitive activity’. So what is judgement? In his mature work, he characterizes judging as ‘acknowledging the truth’ (‘Anerkennen der Wahrheit’). Frege’s remarks about judging as acknowledging the truth of a thought require further elaboration and development. I will argue that the development that best suits his argumentative purposes takes acknowledging the truth of a thought to be a non-propositional attitude like seeing an object; it is a mental relation between a thinker, a thought, and an object, namely a truth-value

Bolzano holds that every sentence can be paraphrased into a sentence of the form "A has b". Bolzano's arguments for this claim are reconstructed and discussed. Since they crucially rely on Bolzano's notion of paraphrase, this notion is investigated in detail. Bolzano has usually been taken to require that in a correct paraphrase the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence express the same proposition. In view of Bolzano's texts and systematical considerations this interpretation is rejected: Bolzano only holds that the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence must be equipollent ("gleichgeltend"). It is shown that even this modest view of paraphrase does not help Bolzano in sustaining his claim that all sentences have the form "A has b".

According to Frege, neither demonstratives nor indexicals are singular terms; only a demonstrative together with ‘circumstances accompanying its utterance’ has sense and singular reference. While this view seems defensible for demonstratives, where demonstrations serve as non-verbal signs, indexicals, especially pure indexicals like ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’, seem not to be in need of completion by circumstances of utterance. In this paper I argue on the basis of independent reasons that indexicals are in fact in need of completion; I identify the completers as uses of circumstances of utterance by the speaker; and I show how these uses together with the utterance of indexical sentences express thoughts. The starting point of the paper is a criticism of Kripke’s and Künne’s alternative treatment of indexicals in Frege’s framework

Does (affirmative) judgement have a logical dual, negative judgement? Whether there is such a logical dualism was hotly debated at the beginning of the twentieth century. Frege argued in ?Negation? (1918/9) that logic can dispense with negative judgement. Frege's arguments shaped the views of later generations of analytic philosophers, but they will not have convinced such opponents as Brentano or Windelband. These philosophers believed in negative judgement for psychological, not logical, reasons. Reinach's ?On the Theory of Negative Judgement? (1911) spoke to the concerns of these philosophers. While Frege took the distinction between affirmative and negative judgement to be logically redundant, Reinach argued that it is the result of confusing judgement with a different mental act. In this article, I present Reinach's arguments against the ?old logical dualism? in context, analyse them and discuss Reinach's innovative use of the notion of focus in the theory of judgement. Recently, there has been a revival of the view that sentential negation is grounded in a prior mental act of rejection. In the final section, I argue that Reinach's analysis of rejection poses a challenge for the revivalists

Ever since Frege, propositions have played a central role in philosophy of language. Propositions are generally conceived as abstract objects that have truth conditions essentially and fulfill both the role of the meaning of sentences and of the objects or content of propositional attitudes. More recently, the abstract conception of propositions has given rise to serious dissatisfaction among a number of philosophers, who have instead proposed a conception of propositional content based on cognitive acts (Hanks, Moltmann, Soames). This approach is not entirely new, though, but has important precedents in early analytic philosophy and phenomenology. The aim of this volume is bring together some of the most important texts from the relevant historical literature and new contributions from contemporary proponents of act-based conceptions of propositional content.

Nelson Goodman and, following him, Catherine Z. Elgin and Keith Lehrer have claimed that sometimes a sample is a symbol that stands for the property it is a sample of. The relation between the sample and the property it stands for is called 'exemplification' (Goodman, Elgin) or 'exemplarisation' (Lehrer). Goodman and Lehrer argue that the notion of exemplification sheds light on central problems in aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. However, while there seems to be a phenomenon to be captured, Goodman's account of exemplification has several flaws. In this paper I will offer an alternative account of exemplification that is inspired by Grice's idea that one can communicate something by providing one's audience with intention-independent evidence and letting them draw the obvious conclusion for themselves. This explication of exemplification will solve the problems that arose for Goodman's theory in the spirit of his approach.1.

Frege held that singular terms can refer only to objects, not to concepts. I argue that the counter-intuitive consequences of this claim ('the concept paradox') arise from Frege's mirroring principle that an incomplete expression can only express an incomplete sense and stand for an incomplete reference. This is not, as is sometimes thought, merely because predicates and singular terms cannot be intersubstituted salva veritate ( congruitate ). The concept paradox, properly understood, poses therefore a different, harder, challenge. An investigation of the foundations of the mirroring principle also sheds light on the role which language plays in Frege's epistemology of logic.

Proper names play an important role in our understanding of linguistic ‘aboutness’ or reference. For instance, the name-bearer relation is a good candidate for the paradigm of the reference relation: it provides us with our initial grip on this relation and controls our thinking about it. For this and other reasons proper names have been at the center of philosophical attention. However, proper names are as controversial as they are conceptually fundamental. Since Kripke’s seminal lectures Naming and Necessity the controversy about proper names has taken the form of a debate between two main camps, descriptivists and non-descriptivists like Kripke himself.The lectures were given in Princeton in 1970 and published in book form as Naming and Necessity .Descriptivists hold that there is a close connection between proper names and definite descriptions: the meaning or sense of a proper name can be given by a definite description. Th ..