Arnaud Dewalque

What exactly do you do when you introspect? Do you shift your attention from the world to your ongoing conscious states qua objects of experience, as empiricists say? Or do you exercise your rational capacities to ascribe mental states to yourself, as rationalists say? In this chapter, we explore a middle path between empiricism and rationalism. We propose that introspection involves experiencing or living through your ongoing conscious states in a distinctive manner, namely “introspectively”. We call this view introspective adverbialism. Drawing on insights from C.D. Broad, G.F. Stout and G. Dawes Hicks, we set the stage for introspective adverbialism (Sections 1-2), provide indirect phenomenological support for it (Section 3), and briefly explain what it means for you to experience your conscious states introspectively (Section 4).

One of the most fundamental divides in contemporary philosophy of consciousness is whether phenomenal consciousness requires some form of self-consciousness. More specifically, disagreement revolves around the “Awareness Principle”: For any subject S and conscious mental state M of S, S is aware of M. We call the relevant awareness of one’s own mental states “inner awareness.” While the Awareness Principle (or some idea in the vicinity) was largely accepted by early phenomenologists and early analytic philosophers, it is much more disputed by contemporary philosophers of mind. In this chapter, we offer a bird’s-eye view of philosophical debates surrounding the Awareness Principle. Our goal is to review the main theoretical options available on the market. We open by distinguishing various versions of the Awareness Principle (§1) before addressing the place of inner awareness in the history of philosophy (§2) and in contemporary debates on consciousness (§3).

According to the transparency thesis, some conscious states are transparent or “diaphanous”. This thesis is often believed to be incompatible with an inner‐awareness account of phenomenal consciousness. In this article, I reject this incompatibility. Instead, I defend a compatibilist approach to transparency. To date, most attempts to do so require a rejection of strong transparency in favor of weak transparency. In this view, transparent states can be attended to by attending (in the right way) to the presented world: that is, they are merely translucent. Here, I first argue that this understanding of transparency is too weak to qualify as a compatibilist view. Drawing on insights from Franz Brentano, I then describe a middle road between strong and weak transparency. The crucial idea is that, although transparent states cannot be attended to, they can be noticed (under suitable conditions). This view, I submit, allows supporters of inner awareness to commit themselves to a more interesting understanding of transparency—moderate transparency—that preserves the initial intuition underlying the transparency metaphor.

To Occamize a nominal expression N is to show that, despite grammatical appearances, N does not name, or denote, an entity. This article argues that the Occamization of ‘meaning,’ which was central to Gilbert Ryle’s meta-philosophy, had already been advanced by Franz Brentano. The core thesis of the article is that Brentano’s notion of ‘content,’ albeit different from that of linguistic rules, does a similar job of eliminating expendable entities. If the meaning of a linguistic expression is not an entity at all, then the question as to what kind of entity it is—what I shall call the Locke-Frege problem—turns out to be a pseudo-problem and is better dispensed with.

This chapter argues that Gilbert Ryle’s account of misleading expressions, which is rightly considered a milestone in the history of analytic philosophy, is continuous with Brentano’s. Not only did they identify roughly the same classes of misleading expressions, but their analyses are driven by a form of ontological parsimony which sharply contrasts with rival views in the Brentano School, like those of Meinong and Husserl. Section 1 suggests that Ryle and Brentano share a similar notion of analysis. Section 2 spells out the notion of misleading expression by means of the surface-grammar/truth-conditions distinction, which I argue is implicit in their accounts. Section 3 zooms in on a specific class of misleading expressions, namely expressions about ficta. Finally, Section 4 draws the consequences of what precedes for a correct understanding of the notion of meaning.

The contributions gathered in this volume address various facets of the philosophical psychology elaborated on by Alexius Meinong and some of his students. They cover a wide range of topics, from the place of psychological investigations in Meinong’s philosophical programme to his thought-provoking views on perception, colours, Vorstellungsproduktion, assumptions, values, truth, and emotions. Although psychological themes are omnipresent in the works of Meinong and his students, it is probably not unfair to say that their theory of the mind received considerably less attention in literature than their object theory, which somehow became the hallmark of the Meinong School. Our hope is that this volume will help restore the balance and, indirectly, foster a novel understanding of Meinong’s philosophy in the context of his time.

This article compares and contrasts the reception of Comte’s positivism in the works of William Whewell, John Stuart Mill and (to a lesser extent) Franz Brentano. It is argued that Whewell’s rejection of positivism derives from his endorsement of (what I shall call) a constructivist account of the inductive sciences, while Mill and Brentano’s sympathies for positivism are connected to their endorsement of an empiricist account. The mandate of the article is to spell out the chief differences between these two rival accounts. In the last, conclusive section, Whewell’s anti-positivist argument is briefly assessed and rebutted.

This collection of fourteen original essays addresses the seminal contribution of Franz Brentano and his heirs, to philosophy of language. Despite the great interest provoked by the Brentanian tradition and its multiple connections with early analytic philosophy, precious little is known about the Brentanian contribution to philosophy of language. The aim of this new collection is to fill this gap by providing the reader with a more thorough understanding of the legacy of Brentano and his school, in their pursuit of a unique research programme according to which the analysis of meaning is inseparable from philosophical inquiries into what goes on in the mind and what there is in the world. In three parts, the volume first reconstructs Brentano’s pathbreaking thoughts on meaning and grammatical illusions, exploring their strong connections with the Austro-German tradition and analytic philosophy. It then addresses the multifaceted debates on the objectivity of meaning in the Brentano School and its aftermath. Finally, part three explores Brentano’s wider legacy, namely: Husserl’s theory of modification and typicality, Bühler’s theory of linguistic and non-linguistic expressions, and Wittgenstein’s thoughts on guidance and rule-following. The result is a unique collection of essays which shows the significance, originality and timely character of the Brentanian philosophy of language.

Franz Brentano’s works are not just full of deep and innovative insights into mind, world and values. His views also turned out to be highly influential upon several generations of students, who made them the basis of their own philosophical investigations, giving rise to what is known as the Brentano School (Albertazzi et al. 1996; Fisette & Fréchette 2007). In this chapter, I give a bird’s eye view of the Brentano School from a rather historical perspective. My leading hypothesis is that one crucial factor explaining the rise of the school is Brentano’s unique strategy, within the academic context of the time, to promote the revival of philosophy as a rigorous science. After a brief introduction, I reconstruct the three main phases in the school’s development, namely Brentano’s teaching in Würzburg (1866-73), his teaching in Vienna (1874-95), and Anton Marty’s teaching in Prague (1880-1913).