Denis Fisette

Mon objectif dans cette étude est de revoir ses textes principaux sur la conscience dans la perspective des deux thèses qu'il formule sur la conscience au tout début du deuxième chapitre du deuxième livre de sa Psychologie. Dans les trois premières sections de cette étude, je propose une analyse de ces deux thèses en accordant une attention particulière à la relation que Brentano établit entre la conscience et l'intentionnalité. J'examinerai ensuite sa théorie des objets primaires et des objets secondaires par laquelle il articule ses deux thèses sur la conscience. Dans la cinquième et la sixième section, j'examine deux problèmes que soulève la théorie de la conscience de Brentano, à savoir le problème de la régression et celui de la complexité qu'il cherche à résoudre à l'aide de son principe de l'unité de la conscience. Dans la dernière partie, je me pencherai sur quelques écrits de Brentano publiés à titre posthume dans lesquels il fait intervenir la notion d'agent psychique (psychich Tätige) dans ses propos sur la conscience et j'essayerai de montrer que la prise en compte de l'agent dans ces écrits vise à solutionner certains problèmes laissés en suspens dans sa Psychologie.

In this study, I propose to examine Marty's reconstruction of the general framework in which Brentano develops his theory of consciousness. My starting point is the formulation, at the very beginning of the second chapter of the second book of Brentano's Psychology, of two theses on mental phenomena, which constitute the basis of Brentano's theory of primary and secondary objects. In the second part, I examine the objection of infinite regress raised against Brentano's theory of primary and secondary objects and Marty's interpretation of Brentano's theory of the unity of consciousness. The third part bears on the important distinction between implicit and explicit consciousness, which Brentano introduces in his lectures on descriptive psychology. Here, I analyse Marty's principle of individuation in light of the modifications which Brentano made to his theory of consciousness after the publication of his Psychology in 1874. The last section is an examination of Marty's conception of consciousness as self-consciousness with respect to his principle of individuation.

In this study, I propose to examine Marty's reconstruction of the general framework in which Brentano develops his theory of consciousness. My starting point is the formulation, at the very beginning of the second chapter of the second book of Brentano's Psychology, of two theses on mental phenomena, which constitute the basis of Brentano's theory of primary and secondary objects. In the second part, I examine the objection of infinite regress raised against Brentano's theory of primary and secondary objects and Marty's interpretation of Brentano's theory of the unity of consciousness. The third part bears on the important distinction between implicit and explicit consciousness, which Brentano introduces in his lectures on descriptive psychology. Here, I analyse Marty's principle of individuation in light of the modifications which Brentano made to his theory of consciousness after the publication of his Psychology in 1874. The last section is an examination of Marty's conception of consciousness as self-consciousness with respect to his principle of individuation.

This paper focuses on Carl Stumpf’s evaluation of Husserl’s phenomenology in his Logical Investigations and in the first book of Ideas. I first examine Stumpf’s reception of the phenomenology of the Logical Investigations. I then turn to §§ 85-86 of Ideas, in which Husserl seeks to distinguish his “pure” phenomenology from Stumpf’s phenomenology. In the third part, I examine Stumpf’s critique of the new version of phenomenology that Husserl develops in his Ideas in §13 of Erkenntnislehre, and, in the fourth part, I examine the Spinozist interpretation of noetic-noematic correlations in Stumpf’s two studies of Spinoza. I conclude by asking whether the version of phenomenology that Husserl elaborates on during the Freiburg period does not anticipate, to some extent, Stumpf’s criticisms while confirming the latter’s diagnosis of the phenomenology of Ideas.

In this paper, I propose a reassessment of Brentano’s most important writings on consciousness. My starting point is the formulation of two theses on consciousness that Brentano expresses at the very beginning of the second chapter of the second book of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, which constitute the foundation of his theory of primary and secondary objects. My working hypothesis rests on the principle of the unity of consciousness, which is the key to most problems generally associated with Brentano’s theory of consciousness. In the second part of my paper, I examine three of these problems, namely, the problem of duplication, that of infinite regress, and that of complexity. In the last part of my paper, I propose an analysis of the principle of the unity of consciousness that takes into account Brentano’s writings after the publication of his Psychology, in 1874, and I briefly appraise the impact, on the atual debates regarding Brentano’s theory of consciousness, of the modifications that Brentano has subjected his theory in several lectures and manuscripts published posthumously.

The purpose of this study is to assess Husserl’s debt to Lotze’s philosophy during the Halle period. I first track the sources of Husserl’s knowledge of Lotze’s philosophy during his studies with Brentano in Vienna and then with Stumpf in Halle. I then briefly comment on Husserl’s references to Lotze in his early work and research manuscripts for the second volume of his Philosophy of Arithmetic. In the third section, I examine Lotze’s influence on Husserl’s anti-psychologistic turn in the mid-1890s. The fourth section is a commentary on Husserl’s manuscript titled “Mikrokosmos,” to which he explicitly refers in his Prolegomena, and which he planned to publish as an appendix of his Logical Investigations. This work contains a detailed analysis of the third book of Lotze’s 1874 Logic. The last section examines Husserl’s arguments against logical psychologism in his Prolegomena, which I discuss through the lens of Stumpf’s critique of psychologism in his paper “Psychology and theory of knowledge”. I argue that Stumpf’s early works on this topic make it possible to establish a connection between Lotze’s interpretation of Plato’s theory of Ideas and Husserl’s anti-psychologism. My hypothesis is that Stumpf’s analyses represent the background of Husserl’s critique of logical psychologism in his Logical Investigations. I conclude by showing that Husserl’s position with respect to Lotze’s philosophy remains basically unchanged after the publication of his Logical Investigations, and that Husserl’s main criticism of Lotze pertains, in the final analysis, to the absence of a theory of intentionality in Lotze’s philosophy.

This study is about Brentano’s criticism of a version of phenomenalism that he calls “mental monism” and which he attributes to positivist philosophers such as Ernst Mach and John Stuart Mill. I am interested in Brentano’s criticism of Mill’s version of mental monism based on the idea of “permanent possibilities of sensation.” Brentano claims that this form of monism is characterized by the identification of the class of physical phenomena with that of mental phenomena, and it commits itself to a form of idealism. Brentano argues instead for a form of indirect or hypothetical realism based on intentional correlations.

This paper is about the question: what is it for a mental state to mean (or present) something as an intentional object? This issue is addressed from a broad perspective, against the background of Brentano’s philosophical programme in Psychology from an empirical standpoint, and the controversy between the proponents of a non-canonical interpretation of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, and the so-called orthodox interpretation advocated namely by R. Chisholm. My investigation is divided into six parts. In the first section, I explain the meaning and function of the notion of phenomenon in light of Brentano’s philosophical programme, and I briefly elucidate the notion of physical phenomenon which, in Brentano’s Psychology, constitutes the primary object of consciousness. In the next two sections, I look at two aspects of Brentano’s criticism of the identity thesis that he attributes to British empiricism, namely the psychological aspect, which concerns the identification of the two classes of phenomena, and the metaphysical aspect relating to the relationship between physical phenomena and the reality of an extramental world. Once this double distinction will be established, I will turn to the relation of intentional objects to presentations and put forward the hypothesis that intentional objects are conceptually dependent upon presentations and that this dependence rests, in turn, upon the content of the mental phenomena. The next step concerns Brentano’s theory of primary and secondary objects, and one of the main non-orthodox arguments against the canonical interpretation, namely that the latter conflates primary and secondary objects. In this context, I examine a second hypothesis: that the secondary object, or intentional correlate of an act, is an intentional content, which is distinct both from the intentional object and from the reality to which it relates, and I maintain that the intentional content has the function of mediating the mental acts’ relation to their objects. Finally, I shall examine some objections against the hypothesis of intentional content in Brentano’s Psychology, and I will conclude with a brief commentary on the bearing of this investigation with regard to the interpretation of the genesis of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, before and after the reistic turn of his philosophy.

Franz Brentano’s impact on the philosophy of his time and on 20th-century philosophy is considerable. The “sharp dialectician” (Freud) and “genial master” (Husserl) influenced philosophers of various allegiances, being acknowledged not only as the “grandfather of phenomenology” (Ryle) but also as an analytic philosopher “in the best sense of this term” (Chisholm). The fourteen new essays gathered together in this volume give an insight in three core issues of Brentano’s philosophy: consciousness (sect.1), intentionality (sect. 2) and ontology and metaphysics (sect. 3). Two further sections of the volume deal with the posterity of his philoso¬phy: 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 text of a public lecture given by Brentano on the laws of inference.

This study is about an aspect of the reception of Herbatianism in Austria which has not been thoroughly investigated so far. It pertains to a controversy opposing Robert Zimmermann and Franz Brentano in the context of discussions which took place in the Philosophical Society of the University of Vienna. This study looks more specifically at three important episodes involving the Philosophical Society, first, the controversy over Herbartianism, second that over the evaluation of Schelling’s philosophy, and finally the reception of Bolzano in Austria. I will first describe the circumstances that led Zimmermann to get involved in the Philosophical Society and the source of his controversy with Brentano and his followers. I will then comment Zimmermann’s address as chairman of the Philosophical Society and Brentano’s reaction to Zimmermann’s remarks on Schelling and the historical period to which he belongs. I will complete my analysis of Brentano’s reaction with a summary of his evaluation of Herbart’s philosophical program to which Zimmermann adhered. The last part focuses on Zimmermann’s decisive role in the reception of Bolzano in Vienna in connection with the Bolzano Commission established by the Philosophical Society. I will conclude with brief remarks on Zimmermann’s legacy in Vienna.

In this study, I will first introduce Husserl’s analysis in Studien zur Struktur des Bewußtseins by emphasizing the reasons that motivate these analyses on descriptive psychology and their status in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology in the late Freiburg period. I will then focus on the structure of acts, with particular emphasis on three aspects stressed by Husserl in Studien: intentionality, the taxonomy of acts, and Brentano’s principle of the Vorstellungsgrundlage. The last three parts of this study outline the characteristic features of three fundamental aspects of affective life in Husserl’s phenomenology: emotions, sense feelings, and moods. I will conclude with some general remarks on the status of affects and values in Husserl’s phenomenology.

The book discusses Franz Brentano’s impact on Austrian philosophy. It contains both a critical reassessment of Brentano’s place in the development of Austrian philosophy at the turn of the 20th century and a reevaluation of the impact and significance of his philosophy of mind or ‘descriptive psychology’ which was Brentano's most important contribution to contemporary philosophy and to the philosophy in Vienna. In addition, the relation between Brentano, phenomenology, and the Vienna Circle is investigated, together with a related documentation of Brentano's disciple Alfred Kastil. The general part deals with the ongoing discussion of Carnap's "Aufbau" and the philosophy of mind, with a focus on physicalism as discussed by Carnap and Wittgenstein. As usual, two reviews of recent publications in the philosophy of mathematics and research on Otto Neurath's lifework are included as related research contributions. This book is of interest to students, historians, and philosophers dealing with the history of Austrian and German philosophy in the 19th and 20th century.

This paper is the general introduction to a collection of essays entitled Franz Brentano and Austrian Philosophy (forthcoming). In this substantial introduction, I comment several aspects of the recent reception of Brentano’s philosophical programme in contemporary philosophy, and the actual debates on topics such as emotions, values, and intentionality, for example. It is divided in four parts corresponding to the four sections of the book. The first three sections contain 11 original contributions on Brentano’s philosophy and its place in the history of philosophy in Austria, and the last section contains three unpublished manuscripts from Alfred Kastil et Moritz Schlick. I. Descriptive psychology and phenomenology: Brentano and Husserl II. Brentano and the Vienna Circle III. Brentano and the history of philosophy IV. Documentation: Alfred Kastil and the Vienna Circle

This volume brings together contributions that explore the philosophy of Franz Brentano. It looks at his work both critically and in the context of contemporary philosophy. For instance, Brentano influenced the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, the theory of objects of Alexius Meinong, the early development of the Gestalt theory, the philosophy of language of Anton Marty, the works of Carl Stumpf in the psychology of tone, and many others. Readers will also learn the contributions of Brentano's work to much debated contemporary issues in philosophy of mind, ontology, and the theory of emotions. The first section deals with Brentano’s conception of the history of philosophy. The next approaches his conception of empirical psychology from an empirical standpoint and in relation with competing views on psychology from the period. The third section discusses Brentano’s later programme of a descriptive psychology or “descriptive phenomenology” and some of his most innovative developments, for instance in the theory of emotions. The final section examines metaphysical issues and applications of his mereology. His reism takes here an important place. The intended readership of this book comprises phenomenologists, analytic philosophers, philosophers of mind and value, as well as metaphysicians. It will appeal to both graduate and undergraduate students, professors, and researchers in philosophy and psychology.

This paper is mainly about Brentano’s commentaries on Ernst Mach in his lectures “Contemporary philosophical questions” which he held one year before he left Austria. I will first identify the main sources of Brentano’s early interests in positivism during his Würzburg period. The second section provides a short overview of Brentano’s 1893– 1894 lectures and his criticism of Comte, Kirchhoff, and Mill. The next sections bear on Brentano’s criticism of Mach’s monism and Brentano’s argument against the reduction of the mental based on his theory of intentionality. The last section is about Brentano’s proposal to replace the identity relation in Mach’s theory of elements by that of intentional correlation. I conclude with a remark on the history of philosophy in Austria.

This is the introduction to volume IX of Brentano’s Complete Published Writings: Sämtliche veröffentlichte Schriften: Vermischte Schriften. Brentano’s writings reproduced in this volume provide a substantial complement to important aspects of Brentano's philosophy which are less explicit in the other works he published during his lifetime. This volume contains thirteen writings: three of them belong to the period of Würzburg, two to the Italian period, and the others belong to the period of his teaching in Vienna. They can be grouped under three broad categories. The first corresponds to the theme of the future of philosophy and the philosophical prospects in the late nineteenth century. This issue is recurrent in Brentano's work and is to be found in several of his writings published in this volume, notably in his inaugural address at the University of Vienna, in which he seeks, among other things, to trace the sources of discouragement with respect to the state of philosophy at that time and to rehabilitate confidence and optimism in the future of philosophy. The second topic pertains to Brentano’s philosophy of the history of philosophy and in addition to the article already mentioned in which Brentano elaborates his theory of the four phases, the article „Was für ein Philosoph manchmal Epoche macht“ is an application of the principles of his philosophy of history to Plotinus’ philosophy. The last section entitled Reviews and circumstantial writings contains more circumstantial writings including four reviews, Brentano’s 1908 paper on Thomas von Aquin and a short polemical paper on research without prejudice. It includes „Der Atheismus und die Wissenschaft“ which is an anonymous article in which Brentano criticizes the author of an article published in a Vienna journal on the compatibility of theism with a philosophy that defines itself as science; the second is Brentano’s reply to a critical review of his Psychology by Adolf Horwicz, the third is a review of J. Delitzsch's book on Thomas von Aquinas , and the last is a significant review of a book by Franz Miklosich on the topic of subjektlose Sätze.