Franz Brentano facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Franz Brentano
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| Born |
Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Josef Brentano
16 January 1838 |
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| Died | 17 March 1917 (aged 79) |
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| Education | University of Munich University of Berlin University of Münster University of Tübingen (PhD, 1862) University of Würzburg (Dr. phil. hab., 1866) |
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| Era | 19th-century philosophy | ||||||
| Region | Western philosophy | ||||||
| School | School of Brentano Aristotelianism Intentionalism ("act psychology") Empirical psychology Austrian phenomenology Austrian realism |
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| Institutions | University of Würzburg (1866–1873) University of Vienna (1873–1895) |
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| Doctoral advisor | Franz Jakob Clemens (PhD thesis advisor) |
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| Other academic advisors | Adolf Trendelenburg | ||||||
| Notable students | Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Tomáš Masaryk, Rudolf Steiner, Alexius Meinong, Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Kazimierz Twardowski, Christian von Ehrenfels | ||||||
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Main interests
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Ontology Psychology |
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Notable ideas
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Influenced
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Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Josef Brentano (born January 16, 1838 – died March 17, 1917) was an important German philosopher and psychologist. His most famous work, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), brought back an old idea called intentionality into modern philosophy. This idea helps us understand how our minds work.
Brentano was first a Catholic priest. But he left the priesthood in 1873 because he disagreed with a new rule about the Pope's power. He then became a professor and taught many young philosophers. His ideas led to new studies in areas like language, logic, math, and how the mind works. Many of his students formed a group known as the School of Brentano.
Contents
Franz Brentano's Life Story
Brentano was born in a place called Marienberg am Rhein, near Boppard. He came from a family of well-known thinkers and artists. He studied philosophy at several universities, including Munich and Berlin. He was very interested in the ideas of Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher, and scholastic philosophy, which was popular in the Middle Ages.
In 1862, he earned his PhD with a paper about Aristotle's ideas on "being." After that, he studied to become a priest and was ordained in 1864.
Teaching and Leaving the Priesthood
In 1866, Brentano started teaching at the University of Würzburg. Some of his early students included Carl Stumpf and Anton Marty. From 1870 to 1873, he was part of a big debate about whether the Pope could make rules that could never be wrong. Brentano strongly disagreed with this idea. Because of his beliefs, he decided to leave the priesthood and his teaching job in 1873. Even so, he remained a very religious person.
In 1874, Brentano published his most important book, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. He then taught at the University of Vienna in Austria-Hungary until 1895. Many famous students learned from him there, including Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, and Tomáš Masaryk.
Brentano faced another challenge in 1880. He had to give up his Austrian citizenship and his full professorship to marry Ida Lieben. This was because Austrian law did not allow former priests to marry. He was still allowed to teach, but in a lower position. After his wife died in 1894, Brentano retired and moved to Florence, Italy. He married his second wife, Emilie Ruprecht, in 1897. When World War I started, he moved to Zürich, Switzerland, where he passed away in 1917.
Brentano's Big Ideas
Brentano is famous for a few key ideas that changed how people thought about the mind and reality.
What is Intentionality?
Brentano is best known for bringing back the idea of intentionality. This concept comes from old scholastic philosophy. Simply put, intentionality means that every mental act, like thinking or feeling, is always about something. It's like your thoughts are always pointed towards an object.
For example, if you believe something, your belief is about what you believe. If you desire something, your desire is about what you want. Brentano said this "aboutness" is what makes mental things different from physical things. Physical things don't have this natural "aboutness" on their own.
Brentano also talked about two kinds of psychology:
- Genetic psychology looks at how our minds develop and change over time. It uses experiments, much like modern science.
- Descriptive psychology tries to describe what it's like to experience things from our own point of view. This idea was later developed by other philosophers.
How We Perceive the World
Brentano had an interesting idea about how we see and understand things. He believed that our external perception (what we see, hear, or touch) might not always tell us the truth about the world. He thought that what we perceive could just be an illusion.
However, he said we can be absolutely sure about our internal perception. For example, if you hear a sound, you can't be completely sure that the sound exists in the real world. But you can be absolutely certain that you are hearing. This awareness of your own experience is called internal perception.
Later in his life, Brentano changed his mind a bit. He started to believe that when we hear a sound, we are indeed hearing something from the outside world.
His Theory of Judgment
Brentano also had a unique idea about how we make judgments. He thought that when we judge something, it's always about whether something exists or not.
For example, if you judge that "unicorns do not exist," you are saying that the idea of unicorns you have in your mind does not point to something real. For Brentano, every judgment is either saying "A exists" or "A does not exist."
One challenge with Brentano's early idea was that he didn't clearly separate the "object" of thought from the "presentation" of that object in our minds. If you think about something, that thought (presentation) exists. So, how can you judge that the object of your thought doesn't exist? One of his students, Kazimierz Twardowski, helped solve this problem by saying that the object and the presentation are different. This meant you could have a presentation of something (which exists in your mind) and still judge that the actual object doesn't exist in the real world.
Brentano's Lasting Impact
Franz Brentano's ideas had a big impact on many important thinkers. The young Martin Heidegger, another famous philosopher, was inspired by Brentano's early work on Aristotle.
Brentano's focus on how our minds are "about" things (intentionality) influenced many schools of thought. These included the Berlin School of experimental psychology, the Prague School of linguistics, and the Lwów School of philosophy. His work was also very important for Edmund Husserl, who developed a major philosophical movement called phenomenology. Brentano's ideas even reached Cambridge University, influencing teachers like George Stout.
See also
In Spanish: Franz Brentano para niños
- Analytic psychology (Dilthey)
- Analytic psychology (Stout)
- Axiological ethics
- Anna von Lieben (his sister-in-law)
- Robert von Lieben (his nephew)
- List of Austrian scientists
- List of Austrians
