Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Franz Brentano and Intentional Inexistence LINDA L. McALISTER FRANZBRnrCrXr~O,in his important early work Psychologie vom empirischen Stand, punkt (1874), maintains that all human experience is divided into two classes: mental phenomena and physical phenomena,x It is then incumbent upon him to show how these two classes of phenomena are to be distinguished one from another. In Book II, Chapter 1, of the Psychologie, he devotes him.self to this task, and in the course of the chapter he surveys several different ways of making out the distinction. After enumerating examples of men~l phenomena and of physical phenomena, he searches for defining characteristics of mental phenomena. He finds several charac, teristics which he thinks all mental phenomena have and all physical phenomena lack or vice versa, but far and away the most important of these, in Brentano's estimation, and the one whdch has aroused the most interest on the part of later philosophers, is what he calls "intentional inexistence," 2 (or merely "intentional existence"; the prefix "in-" does not indicate negation but rathor location, indicating existence in the mind). As examples of mental phenomena Brentano lists first ideas or presentations (Vorstellungen), whether sensory or issuing from the imagination, and by this he meam not the objects which are presented or which one has before one's mind, but rather the condition or, what Brentano; broadly speaking, calls the act of having such an idea or presentation.3 Thus the acts of hearing something, or seeing or perceiving something would be mental phenomena regardless of whether the object which is, e. g., seen, ds perceived through the visual organs or seen in the mind's eye, so to speak. Other examples are acts of judgment, amongwhich Brentano includes ~:emembering, inferring, believing, doubting; and emotions.such as being happy or sad, lovi~,g and hating, along with which Brentano includes such things as willing, intending, choosing, etc.4 i Oskar Kraus, e.d.,2nd ed. (Leipzig,1924),I, 109. Psych. I, 137. Psych. I, 111. " Psych. I, 112. [423] 424 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ExamFles of physical phenomena which Brentano mentions are "a color, a figure, a landscape which I see, a chord which I hear, warmth, cold, odor which I perceive; as well as similar images which appear in the imagination." s It appears from the examFles, then, that mental phenomena are all mental acts, in a broad sense, while physical phenomena are, strictly speaking, all instances of sensible qualities, the inclusion of "a landscape" being, apparently, a slip on Brentano's part, as his student, friend and editor Oskar Kraus points out. 6 As mentioned above, Brentano thought that there is one partieula~ mark of mental phenomena which characterizes them better than any other: Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (by which you should not take me to mean a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something in itself as an object, though they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is affmned or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on.7 Commentators, perhaps not surprisingly, have disagreed as to the precise nature of the view which Brentano is enunciating in this passage,s Some have supposed that since you can think of, hate, or judge, etc., things which do not exist, e.g., Pegasus, then the immanent object of which Brentano speaks i,s not Pegasus but a "thoughtof Pegasus" (gedachtes Pegasus) which exists in one's mind whenever someone th'mks of Pegasus. Apparently H6fler interpreted the doctrine in this way in a paper which he presented to the Fifth International Psychology Congress in 1905.9.In the light of some passages from Brentano's early writings it appears to be a plausible interpretation. Consider, for example, the following passage: There cannot be anyone who contemplates an A unless there is a contemplated A; and conversely.... The two concepts are not identical but they...