Wolfgang Huemer

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.

Fin dall’antichità esiste una tensione tra filosofia e letteratura, a cui David Hume ha dato voce dicendo che i poeti sono «mentitori per professione»: i testi letterari, in quanto opere di finzione che parlano di persone che non sono mai esistite e di eventi che non sono mai accaduti, non contengono proposizioni vere. Ciò implica, però, che essi sono privi di qualsiasi valore cognitivo. Questo articolo cerca di mostrare che tale atteggiamento anticognitivista si basa su una concezione errata del progresso cognitivo, che lo riduce a un accumulo di dati. Quando apprendiamo da un testo letterario, invece, è perché esso ci offre nuove prospettive, approfondisce la nostra comprensione o ci invita a riflettere e ad arrivare a conclusioni nostre.There is an old tension between philosophy and literature that has been brought to the point by David Hume who stated that poets are «liars by profession». Literary texts, as works of fiction that talk about people who have never lived and events that have never taken place, do not contain true propositions and hence do not have any cognitive value. This article aims to show that the anticognitivistic argument is based on a false conception of cognitive progress, which reduces learning to the acquisition of information. We can learn from literary texts, however, because they offer new perspectives, deepen our understanding and invite us to reflect and arrive at our own conclusions

Brentano hat das Zeit-Problem in verschiedenen Phasen seiner Philosophie aus verschiedenen Perspektiven zu lösen gesucht, die in vier Phasen eingeteilt werden können: Erstens die frühe Würzburger Phase, in der er die Zeitdifferenzen in der Weise des urteilenden Verhaltens sieht; zweitens die frühe Wiener Phase, in der er besonderes Augenmerk auf die zeitlichen Unterschiede als Unterschiede des Gegenstandes legt, aber diese seine Auffassung des kontinuierlichen Zeitüberganges auch einer 3-fachen Kritik unterzieht, drittens die Charakterisierung der Zeitunterschiede als Unterschiede des Urteilsmodus; viertens die Auffassung der zeitlichen Unterschiede als Unterschiede des Vorstellens.

Anti-reductionist philosophers have often argued that mental and linguistic phenomena contain an intrinsically normative element that cannot be captured by the natural sciences which focus on causal rather than rational relations. This line of reasoning raises the questions of how reasons could evolve in a world of causes and how children can be acculturated to participate in rule-governed social practices. In this paper I will sketch a Wittgensteinian answer to these questions. I will first point out that throughout his later philosophy Wittgenstein draws a sharp distinction between "teaching" and "training": newly-born children are trained (conditioned) to react to specific stimuli in specific ways, which then allows them to acquire concepts and follow rules. I will then show that this picture presupposes a strong analogy between concepts and capacities, which is also present in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. In the last section I will point out that Wittgenstein only discusses the ontogenetic question of how individual children can acquire speech, but not the phylogenetic question of how rule-governed behavior could evolve in the first place. I will argue that this strategy should not be seen as a shortcoming, but rather as an expression of Wittgenstein's approach that can be characterized as naturalistic in a wide sense.

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."