: Philosophers in the analytic and phenomenological traditions have interpreted Brentano's intentionality thesis, and his empirical psychology more generally, in significantly different ways. Disregarding Brentano's distinctive psychological method, analytic philosophers have typically read him as a philosopher of mind, and his intentionality thesis as a contribution to the Cartesian project of clarifying the distinction between the mental and the physical. Phenomenologists, while more attentive to his method, tended to read Brentano as merely Òon the wayÓ to a truly phenomenological approach. (...) I offer a third reading of Brentano thesis, one that attends to both the motivating concerns and the distinctive methodological features of his psychological project. (shrink)

Phenomenologists call for the abandoning of all philosophical theorizing in favor of a descriptive study of the "things themselves" as they are given. On its face, such a study of appearances would appear to have little to contribute to ontology, traditionally understood as the science of being and its most fundamental categories. But phenomenologists have not hesitated to draw ontological conclusions from their phenomenological investigations. Phenomenology and its ontological pretensions have come under attack, however, from philosophers of a wide variety (...) of persuasions . ;The project of this dissertation is to re-examine the relationship of phenomenology, conceived as a philosophical method, to ontology. I proceed by undertaking systematic critical examinations of the attempts of thee central figures in the phenomenological tradition to arrive at categorial ontological results upon the basis of phenomenological investigations. At issue are Brentano's descriptive psychological studies of so-called mental phenomena in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint , Husserl's static transcendental phenomenological study of the structures of pure consciousness in Ideas I, II, and III, and Sartre's phenomenological ontology of consciousness in Being and Nothingness. For each of these cases, I attempt to ascertain the precise way in which the application of phenomenological methods gives rise to specific ontological claims or "results". In none of these cases, I argue, does the thinker in question succeed in producing ontological assertions in a sufficiently phenomenological fashion. All, that is, depart to some extent from the phenomenological ideal of an ontology arrived at in accordance with an unprejudiced examination and description of "the things themselves". In the final chapter I ask whether the particular failures of these thinkers to have formulated ontological claims in a phenomenologically satisfactory manner implies the general failure of all phenomenological approaches to ontology. I argue that while principled reasons can be given why a truly phenomenological ontology must remain an unattainable ideal, it is an ideal that philosophers ought not abandon. (shrink)