Franz Brentano developed an original theory of intrinsic value which he attempted to base on his philosophical psychology. Roderick Chisholm presents here a critical exposition of this theory and its place in Brentano's general philosophical system. He gives a detailed account of Brentano's ontology, showing how Brentano tried to secure objectivity for ethics not through a theory of practical reason, but through his theory of the intentional objects of emotions and desires. Professor Chisholm goes (...) on to develop certain suggestions about intrinsic value made by Brentano and his students, and discusses their relevance to theodicy and the problem of evil. Brentano, as the teacher of Husserl, Meinong, Twardowski, and others, stands at the origin of the phenomenological tradition and of the Polish school of philosophy that developed after World War I. He has also had considerable influence on Anglo-American philosophy. This book will interest those concerned with the origins of phenomenological value theory and more generally with the connections between ethics and philosophical psychology. (shrink)

Brentano uses terms in place of predicates (e.g. "a thinker" in place of "thinks") and characterizes the "is" of predication in terms of the part-whole relation. Taking as his ontological data certain intentional phenomena that are apprehended with certainty, he conceives the substance-accident relation as a defmeable type of part-whole relation which we can apprehend in "inner perception". He is then able to distinguish the following types of individual or ens reale: substances; primary individuals which are not substances; accidents; (...) aggregates; and boundaries. (shrink)

Franz Brentano is recognised as one of the most important philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This work, first published in English in 1988, besides being an important contribution to metaphysics in its own right, has considerable historical importance through its influence on Husserl’s views on internal time consciousness. The work is preceded by a long introduction by Stephan Körner in collaboration with Brentano’s literary executor Roderick Chisholm. It is translated by Barry Smith.

The concepts of a spatially continuous substance, of spatial dimension and of spatial boundary are here "analyzed out" of the concepts of individual thing, of constituent and of coincidence. The analysis is based upon the theory of spatial coincidence that was developed by Brentano. Its presuppositions are essentially these: (1) if there are spatial objects of any kind, then there are continuous spatial substances. (2) such substances are possibly such that they are not constituents of any individual thing; and (...) (3) they contain constituents (namely, boundaries) which are necessarily such that they are constituents of spatial substances. (shrink)

Körner has made an important distinction between dependent and independent particulars, noting that any adequate theory of categories will divide particulars into those that are independent and those that are not. In the present paper, the concept of a spatial boundary is used to illustrate the concept of a dependent particular. It is suggested that, if we follow Brentano and think of such boundaries as ontologically dependent upon the things of which they may be said to be boundaries, then (...) we will be able to throw light upon a number of philosophical questions about the spatial continuum. These questions pertain to such topics as: the distinction between parts and boundaries; the definition of dimensionality; and the nature of contact and physical continuity. (shrink)

Schlick held that our knowledge is founded upon certain contingent apprehensions which he described as follows: "I grasp their meaning at the same time that I grasp their truth." He cites as an example the apprehension expressed by "Yellow here now." When such apprehensions are expressed in syntactically well-formed sentences, they can be seen to have certain psychological states as their objects - and therefore to be similar in all essential respects to what members of the Brentano school had (...) called "inner perceptions.". (shrink)

Schlick held that our knowledge is founded upon certain contingent apprehensions which he described as follows: "I grasp their meaning at the same time that I grasp their truth." He cites as an example the apprehension expressed by "Yellow here now." When such apprehensions are expressed in syntactically well-formed sentences, they can be seen to have certain psychological states as their objects - and therefore to be similar in all essential respects to what members of the Brentano school had (...) called "inner perceptions.". (shrink)

Körner has made an important distinction between dependent and independent particulars, noting that any adequate theory of categories will divide particulars into those that are independent and those that are not. In the present paper, the concept of a spatial boundary is used to illustrate the concept of a dependent particular. It is suggested that, if we follow Brentano and think of such boundaries as ontologically dependent upon the things of which they may be said to be boundaries, then (...) we will be able to throw light upon a number of philosophical questions about the spatial continuum. These questions pertain to such topics as: the distinction between parts and boundaries; the definition of dimensionality; and the nature of contact and physical continuity. (shrink)

What is the metaphysical significance of what Brentano has shown us about intentionality? It is the fact that intentional phenomena have logical or structural features that are not shared by what is not psychological. It was typical of British empiricism, particularly that of Hume, to suppose that consciousness is essentially sensible. The objects of consciousness were thought to be primarily such objects as sensations and their imagined or dreamed counterparts. In the Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt, Brentano makes clear (...) that intentional phenomena need not be sensible. He is aware that, even if intentional phenomena are always accompanied by sensible or sensational phenomena, they are not themselves sensational or sensible phenomena. And the presence of certain intentional attitudes is at least as certain and indubitable for us as is the presence of our sensations. If I make a certain judgment or ask myself a certain question, then I can know directly and immediately that I make that judgment or ask that question. (This is not to say, of course, that every intentional attitude may be the object of such certainty. Perhaps there is a sense in which you may be said to like or to dislike a certain thing without realizing that you like or dislike that thing.) If I can know directly and immediately that I am making a certain judgment, then, I can know what it is to make such a judgment. And if I know what it is to make a judgment, then, in making the judgment I can know directly and immediately that there is a certain individual thing - namely, the one who makes the judgment. Arid I, of course, am the one who makes my judgments and does my thinking. The same is true, obviously, of my other intentional activities - such activities as wondering, fearing, hoping, desiring, considering, liking and disliking. (shrink)

The fact that boundaries are ontologically dependent entities is agreed by Franz Brentano and Roderick Chisholm. This article studies both authors as a single metaphysical account about boundaries. The Brentano-Chisholm theory understands that boundaries and the objects to which they belong hold a mutual relationship of ontological dependence: the existence of a boundary depends upon a continuum of higher spatial dimensionality, but also is a conditio sine qua non for the existence of a continuum. Although the (...) view that ordinary material objects and their boundaries (or surfaces) ontologically depend on each other is correct, it does not grasp their asymmetric relationship: while the existence of a surface rigidly depends upon the existence of the very object it belongs to, the existence of a physical object generically depends upon having some surface. In modal terms, both are two kinds of de re ontological dependence that this article tries to distinguish. (shrink)

Roderick Chisholm provides, in different places, two formulations of Brentano's thesis about the relation between the psychological and the intentional: (1) all and only psychological sentences are intentional; (2) no psychological intentional sentence is equivalent to a nonintentional sentence. Chisholm also presents several definitions of intentionality. Some of these allow that a sentence is intentional while its negation is nonintentional, which ruins the prospects of defending the more plausible and interesting thesis (2). A generalization of the notion (...) of logical independence to any number of mutually independent sentences permits a revision of Chisholm's criteria of intentionality that ensures that a sentence is intentional on a criterion exactly when its negation is as well. (shrink)

In the following we shall see, however, that Chisholm’s interpretation of Brentano’s intentionality doctrine is not wholly accurate, and that while the doctrine he sets forth as Brentano’s is an interesting and provocative one, it gives a misleading impression of what Brentano’s views actually were, by obscuring almost entirely the specific nature of the question Brentano was trying to solve, and by misreading the answer Brentano gave. If only for the sake of historical accuracy (...) a corrective should be given, but, of course, taking another look at Brentano’s particular way of construing the mind/body problem and the solution he put forth may also prove to be suggestive in its own right. (shrink)

What is consciousness? brentano suggests that consciousness is a simple binary relation between a self and an object. in this paper, i offer a textual clarification and a qualified philosophical defense of brentano's suggestion. in part i, i indicate the ordinary facts of subjective experience that any adequate theory of consciousness must account for. in part ii, i argue on textual grounds that brentano's theory has been misunderstood by chisholm. in part iii, i argue that (...) class='Hi'>brentano's theory meets the conditions of an adequate theory. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

According to Brentano, what is characteristic of every mental act is the reference to something as an object. The exact nature of an object of our mental acts has, however, been first the subject of steady discussion in Brentano's writings and consecutively gave rise to controversy for contemporary philosophers of mind; e.g. Chisholm, Castañeda. What follows is an elucidation of the relationship between Brentano's final theory of sensation and its interpretation in Chisholm's Direct Attribution theory (...) as a consideration of a recent challenge by Castañeda: that while the Brentanian-Chisholmian account is exemplary in dealing with tacit self-reference at the level of unreflective consciousness, this theory needs to be developed even further to be adequate to those cases of self-reference involved in reflective consciousness. (shrink)

A NUMBER of things are immediately striking about Roderick Chisholm’s way of doing philosophy. He is an analytic philosopher who is quite ready to cite at some length such diverse thinkers as Thomas Aquinas, Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, and Edmund Husserl. He unabashedly calls much of his work "metaphysical." His sources and conclusions mark him as something of a maverick, but his philosophical style is quintessential contemporary American establishment. These crosscurrents seem at least potentially exciting. They promise a (...) richness of perspective as well as exactness and clarity in argument. It has become commonplace to deplore the lack of dialogue among the main philosophical "schools" of this century—the analysts, the phenomenologists, etc. In Roderick Chisholm America has produced a philosopher who has consistently refused isolationism even when it has seemed hopelessly fashionable. (shrink)