Wolfgang Huemer

In this article I focus on the question question of why we actually do read literary texts and what the merits of engaging with literary works are. The central argument is that (among the many other functions literature is abile to perform) literature is cognitively valuable by focusing not on what is said, but on how it is said. Reading literary texts adds to our expressive capacities, enriches our conceptual schemes and can so allow us to get a better grasp of (relevant aspects of) the world. In short, Literature is cognitively valuable not in virtue of the content it expresses, but by means of formal or stylistic elements to which it draws our attention.

Die Philosophie der Wahrnehmung der letzten Jahrzehnte ist stark geprägt von der Begrifflichkeitsdebatte. Dabei ist allerdings eine dialektische Pattstellung zu erkennen: während die Begrifflichkeitsthese für gewöhnlich mit der epistemischen Rolle er Wahrnehmung begründet wird, verweisen Argumente für die Nichtbegrifflichkeitsthese zumeist auf die qualitative Reichhaltigkeit und die erlebnismäßig gegebenen, also phänomenologischen Aspekte der Wahrnehmung. Um diese Pattstellung zu überwinden, skizziere ich in diesem Beitrag Überlegungen für ein Argument für die Begrifflichkeitsthese, das wesentliche auf den phänomenologischen Aspekten der Wahrnehmung beruht.

Franz Brentano’s impact on the philosophy of his time and on 20th-century philosophy is considerable. The “sharp dialectician” and “genial master” influenced philosophers of various allegiances, being acknowledged not only as the “grandfather of phenomenology” but also as an analytic philosopher “in the best sense of this term” . The fourteen new essays gathered together in this volume give an insight in three core issues of Brentano’s philosophy: consciousness , intentionality and ontology and metaphysics . Two further sections of the volume deal with the posterity of his philosophy: in section 4, the legacy of his account of sense perception and feeling is discussed, while the history of Brentano’s unpublished manuscripts is discussed in section 5. This section also presents an edition of a manuscript from 1899 on relations, along with the letters from Brentano to Marty which discuss this manuscript. The last part of section 5 contains the tekst of a public lecture given by Brentano on the laws of inference.

The articles in this volume discuss the relation between values and ontology, focusing on the significance of ontology for ethics and aesthetics, i.e., themes which due to the raising interest in ontology come to play a central role in contemporary philosophical debate. The contributors address the questions of whether and in which sense values can be considered to be real, whether it is possible to experience them, and in which sense we can speak about their objective validity. These topics which were also discussed by early phenomenologists like Brentano, Meinong, Ehrenfels, proponents of Gestalt psychology like Kohler, by Husserl, and by French phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty are approached by both historical and systematic analysis."

Die 4. Auflage bringt zunächst die Kommentierung der Präambel und der Art. 1 bis 19 auf den aktuellen Stand von Judikatur und Literatur. Die grundlegende Struktur des Kommentares wurde beibehalten und um neuere Entwicklungen wie die Implikationen der Europäisierung und Digitalisierung sowie der Corona-Pandemie ergänzt.Die Herausgeberschaft des Kommentares hat ab der 4. Auflage Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf übernommen. Auch im Autorenkreis sind personelle Veränderungen zu verzeichnen: Mit Ausnahme von Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf, Alexander Thiele und Ferdinand Wollenschläger, die bereits an der 3. Auflage mitgewirkt haben, liegen die Kommentierungen in den Händen neuer Autorinnen und Autoren.Der Kommentar erscheint in drei Bänden und wird nur geschlossen abgegeben.Der Grundgesetz-Kommentar ist Bestandteil des Moduls Verfassungsrecht PREMIUM, das bei beck-online.de erhältlich ist.

A team of leading contributors from both philosophical and literary backgrounds have been brought together in this impressive book to examine how works of literary fiction can be a source of knowledge. Together, they analyze the important trends in this current popular debate. The innovative feature of this volume is that it mixes work by literary theorists and scholars with work of analytic philosophers that combined together provide a comprehensive statement of the variety of ways in which works of fiction can engage questions of worldly interest. It uses the problem of cognitive value to explore: literature’s contribution to ethical life literature’s ability to engage in social and political critique the role narrative plays in opening up possibilities of moral, aesthetic, experience and selfhood This remarkable volume will attract the attention of both literature and philosophy scholars with its statement of the various ways that literature and life take an interest in one another.

In his entire oeuvre Brentano defended a scientific conception of philosophy and advocated the adoption of a rigorous, scientific method. Given this background it might come as a surprise that in his reflections on aesthetics he firmly rejected the classic definition of aesthetics as the science of beauty. This must not be read as an expression of disinterest in – or a dismissal of – aesthetics, though. It is rather an expression of Brentano's view concerning the position of aesthetics in his overall system. He conceived it – on a par with logic and ethics – not as a theoretical science, but as a practical discipline that was rooted in psychology: aesthetics, Brentano suggests, is not constituted by a set of intrinsically related propositions; it rather serves the practical purpose of instructing those who want to experience the beautiful with correct taste or to create works of art. The task of aesthetics is, in other words, to formulate a set of rules or instructions that teach us how to correctly experience beauty, how to come to prefer the more over the less beautiful, but also how to create beauty and how to produce works of art that have the power to bring about aesthetic pleasure in the beholder.

Both Husserl and Haugeland develop an account of constitution to address the question of how our mental episodes can be about physical objects and thus, through the intentional relation, bridge the gap between the mental and the physical. The respective theories of the two philosophers of very different background show not only how mental episodes can have empirical content, but also how this content is shaped by past experiences or a holistic background of other mental episodes. In this article I first outline and then contrast their positions in order to show how the notion of constitution can be adopted to address major problems of contemporary philosophy of mind, especially the question of how the mind can be related to its physical environment

In this article we present and compare two early attempts to establish psychology as an independent scientific discipline that had considerable influence in central Europe: the theories of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776—1841) and Franz Brentano (1838—1917). While both of them emphasize that psychology ought to be conceived as an empirical science, their conceptions show revealing differences. Herbart starts with metaphysical principles and aims at mathematizing psychology, whereas Brentano rejects all metaphysics and bases his method on a conception of inner perception (as opposed to inner observation) as a secondary consciousness, by means of which one gets to be aware of all of one’s own conscious phenomena. Brentano’s focus on inner perception brings him to deny the claim that there could be unconscious mental phenomena — a view that stands in sharp contrast to Herbart’s emphasis on unconscious, ‘repressed’ presentations as a core element of his mechanics of mind. Herbart, on the other hand, denies any role for psychological experiments, while Brentano encouraged laboratory work, thus paving the road for the more experimental work of his students like Stumpf and Meinong. By briefly tracing the fate of the schools of Herbart and Brentano, respectively, we aim to illustrate their impact on the development of psychological research, mainly in central Europe.

_The Literary Wittgenstein_ is a stellar collection of articles relating the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) to core problems in the theory and philosophy of literature. Amid growing recognition that Wittgenstein's philosophy has important implications for literary studies, this book brings together twenty-one articles by the most prominent figures in the field. Eighteen of the articles are published here for the first time. _The Literary Wittgenstein_ applies the approach of Wittgenstein to core areas of literary theory, including poetry, deconstruction, the ethical value of literature, and the nature and logic of fictional discourse. The literary dimension of Wittgenstein's own writings is also explored, such as the authorial strategy of the _Tractatus_, and writing and method in the _Philosophical Investigations_. Major literary figures discussed in the book include William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, and Friedrich Hölderlin. By mapping out the foundations of a new approach to literature, _The Literary Wittgenstein_ is essential reading for anyone interested in the relevance and application of Wittgenstein's thought to literary theory, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language and logic.