Guillaume Fréchette

No seguinte artigo, discuto a resconstrução de Fisette da visão de Brentano, de acordo com a qual a concepção da consciência de Brentano e a sua unidade é baseada na pressuposição de que a consciência tenha um portador, i.e., uma alma. Primeiramente, identifico o alvo real de Fisette (sec. 1) e desafio a sua concepção de agente mental como central para a teoria de Brentano (sec. 2 e 3). Na seção 4, formulo algumas dúvidas sobre as fontes usadas por Fisette, e na seção 5, proponho outra leitura da relação entre a unidade da consciência e o agente mental no Brentano tardio.

Is phenomenology nothing else than descriptive psychology? In the first edition of his Logical Investigations (LI), Husserl conceived of phenomenology as a description and analysis of the experiences of knowledge, unequivocally stating that “phenomenology is descriptive psychology.” Most interestingly, although the first edition of the LI was the reference par excellence in phenomenology for the Munich phenomenologists, they remained suspicious of this characterisationof phenomenology. The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the reception of descriptive psychology among Munich phenomenologists and, at the same time, to offer a re-evaluation of their understanding of realist phenomenology.

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in section 4, the legacy of his account of sense perception and feeling is discussed, while the history of Brentano’s unpublished manuscripts is discussed in section 5.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.

For many years, the importance and significance of Brentano’s conception of time-consciousness in contemporary philosophy was closely tied with Husserl’s adaptation of this conception in his own lectures on time-consciousness. These lectures, which Husserl held in Göttingen in 1904-05, were edited in the 1920s by the brilliant phenomenologist Edith Stein and are the source of many of the central ideas of transcendental phenomenology. In April 1926, Stein’s work was then taken over by Martin Heidegger, a young careerist who, after spending some years as Husserl’s assistant in Freiburg, took over many of Husserl’s ideas and published a volume on being and time that would convince Husserl to choose him as his successor. Soon enough, and thanks to the publication of Husserl’s lectures, “Brentano’s conception of time-consciousness” became the heading of a supposedly surpassed and defective theory, which was to be replaced subsequently by transcendental phenomenology and its heirs in Freiburg and later in France. This brief and quite tragic history of the reception of Brentano’s conception of time-consciousness has meanwhile been rectified to some extent by a number of works that offer a less biased picture of Brentano’s various conceptions of time-consciousness. The picture remains incomplete, however, without a consideration of the motivations behind the different conceptions advocated by Brentano. By taking Brentano’s metaphysical views into account as his background motivation, it is possible to draw a comprehensive picture of the different conceptions he defended and to get around the uneasy division of his works into early and ‘mature’ views, which has often been taken as a starting point for assessing the importance of reism (see CHAP. 13) at the expense of the rest of his works. While such divisions may be historically justified, they tend to hide the forest behind the trees. For this reason, I will first start with a description of the forest (§§2-3) to finish with a classification of the trees (§4).

The Handbook of Experimental Economic Methodology, edited by Guillaume R. Fréchette and Andrew Schotter, aims to confront and debate the issues faced by the growing field of experimental economics. For example, as experimental work attempts to test theory, it raises questions about the proper relationship between theory and experiments. As experimental results are used to inform policy, the utility of these results outside the lab is questioned, and finally, as experimental economics tries to integrate ideas from other disciplines like psychology and neuroscience, the question of their proper place in the discipline of economics becomes less clear.This book contains papers written by some of the most accomplished scholars working at the intersection of experimental, behavioral, and theoretical economics talking about methodology. It is divided into four sections, each of which features a set of papers and a set of comments on those papers. The intention of the volume is to offer a place where ideas about methodology could be discussed and even argued. Some of the papers are contentious---a healthy sign of a dynamic discipline---while others lay out a vision for how the authors think experimental economics should be pursued. This exciting and illuminating collection of papers brings light to a topic at the core of experimental economics. Researchers from a broad range of fields will benefit from the exploration of these important questions.

Le livre introduit, traduit et annoté par P. Limido-Heulot s’ajoute aux rares traductions françaises des œuvres d’Ingarden: à l’exception d’articles isolés, notons que les traductions de Philibert Secretan et celle de la musicologue montréalaise Dujka Smoje étaient jusqu’à ce jour les seules à reprendre en français sous la forme de livres des ouvrages publiés par le phénoménologue polonais. Bien qu’elle ne nous offre pas un ouvrage intégral d’Ingarden, la traduction de Limido-Heulot regroupe toutefois des textes qui, pour trois d’entre eux, avaient déjà été réunis par l’auteur dans son recueil d’articles Z badan nad filozofia wspolczesna en 1963.

In this article, I shed some light on Meinong’s motivations for the theory of objects. I argue that one of its basic principles, the principle of indifference, is driven by an intuition common to many Austrian philosophers, which is that something must first be somehow pre-given in order to simply address the issue of its being or non-being. Meinong’s way of spelling out this intuition, I suggest, is to show that there are homeless objects, that is, objects that are not dealt with by any of the existing sciences. Therefore, the indispensability of the theory of objects lies in the plausibility of the thesis that there are such homeless objects. I analyse and evaluate two Meinongian arguments supporting this thesis, I explain how Meinong came to believe that they support the indispensability of the theory of objects, and I stress some advantages of this account over Brentano’s intentionality thesis.

Although Wilhelm Dilthey and Franz Brentano apparently were pursuing roughly the same objective—to offer a description of our mental functions and of their relations to objects—and both called their respective research programs ‘descriptive psychology’, they seem to have used the term to refer to two different methods of psychological research. In this article, I compare analyses of these differences. Against the reading of Orth but also against a possible application of recent relativist accounts of the epistemology of peer disagreement to this case, I argue that their apparent shared objective is not enough to support an understanding of their views as two alternatives within a given historical or scientific context, or as a mutual peer disagreement. I show that the impression of a shared objective can be explained away as stemming from the influence of their teacher Adolf Trendelenburg, and I stress that the case of introspection strongly suggests that an account in terms of peer disagreement is not plausible. Finally, I conclude that the opposition between two traditions, Austrian philosophy and historicism, might be better suited to account for the dispute and its apparent common historical context.

Phenomenological accounts of intuition are often considered as significantly different from, or even incommensurable with most of the conception of intuitions defended in analytical philosophy. In this paper, I reject this view. Starting with what I consider to be a relatively neutral phenomenological account of intuition, I first present the main features of Husserl’s and Brentano’s accounts of intuition, showing the structural similarities and differences between these two views. After confronting them, I finally come back to what unites the two views in order to outline a map of the problem of intuition in which both traditions, the analytical and the phenomenological, appear as two complementary takes on one and the same problem

The varieties of accounts of abstraction in the school of Brentano seem to be a function of the different views adopted on ontology, by Brentano himself but also by his students. The line going from conceptualism to empiricism, realism, and later to reism in Brentano’s works is therefore a good guide to understand the evolution of the accounts of abstraction in the school of Brentano. Independently of the views adopted in ontology however, and in contrast with Husserl for instance, it seems that Brentano remained constant in his rejection of the view that abstracting and intuiting should be considered as two distinct modes of consciousness. Husserl addressed an important objection to Brentano’s empiricist account of abstraction in the second Logical Investigation. Brentano never answered to this objection directly. But Marty did. In the following paper, and in order to appreciate Marty’s reply, I offer a reconstruction of Brentano’s and Marty’s early conceptions of abstraction, which serves as the basis for an exposition of Marty’s late account of higher abstraction. I argue that this late account, partly based on Brentano but also developing ideas to which Brentano was opposed, offers a fruitful alternative to Husserl’s view on abstraction in the Logical Investigations.