Psychologist and philosopher, born in Marienberg, E Germany, the brother of Lujo Brentano. He became a Catholic priest (1864), and taught philosophy at Würzburg until 1873. He then abandoned the priesthood, and moved to teach at Vienna until his retirement (1895). In his most important work, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint), he developed the doctrine of intentionality, characterizing mental events as involving the direction of the mind to an object.
Franz Clemens Honoratus Hermann Brentano (January 16, 1838, Marienberg am Rhein, near Boppard – March 17, 1917, Zürich) was an influential figure in both philosophy and psychology. His influence was felt by other figures such as Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, and Kazimierz Twardowski who followed and adapted Brentano's views.
Life
Franz Brentano studied philosophy at the universities of Munich, Würzburg, Berlin (with Adolf Trendelenburg) and Münster.
Subsequently he began to study theology and entered the seminary in Munich and then Würzburg, preparing to become a Roman Catholic priest (ordained August 6, 1864).
Between 1870 and 1873 Brentano was heavily involved in the debate on papal infallibility.
In 1874 Brentano published his major work: "Psychology from an empirical standpoint" and from 1874 to 1895 he taught at the university of Vienna. Among his students were Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Rudolf Steiner and many others (see School of Brentano for more details).
After his retirement he moved to Florence in Italy and at the outbreak of the First World War he transferred to Zürich, where he died in 1917.
Work and thought
Intentionality
Brentano is best known for his reintroduction of the concept of intentionality—a concept derived from scholastic philosophy—to contemporary philosophy in his lectures and in his work Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkte (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint). While often simplistically summarised as "aboutness" or the relationship between mental acts and the external world, Brentano defined it as the main characteristic of psychical phenomena, by which they could be distinguished from physical phenomena.
Theory of perception
He is also well known for claiming that Wahrnehmung ist Falschnehmung ('perception is misception' or literally 'truth-grasping is false-grasping') that is to say perception is erroneous. External perception, sensory perception, can only yield hypotheses about the perceived world, but not truth.
Although this may seem strange in view of the above, Brentano held the firm belief that the method of philosophy should be the method of the natural sciences.
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