The Franz Brentano reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Franz Brentano

Franz Brentano (January 16, 1838 - March 17, 1917) was an influential figure in both philosophy and psychology. His influence was felt by other figures such as Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong who followed and adapted Brentano's views.

The philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano is best known because he reintroduced the concept of intentionality, originally a concept from scholastic philosophy, in contemporary philosophy in lectures and in his work Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkte. 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. Every mental phenomenon, every psychological act has a content, is directed at an object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire etc. has an object that they are about: the believed, the wanted. Brentano used the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the status of the objects of thought in the mind. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to distinguish psychical phenomena and physical phenomena, because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether.

He is also well known for claiming that Wahrnehmung ist Falschnehmung (literally 'truth-grasping is false-grasping') that is to say perception is erroneous. In fact he maintained that external, sensory perception could not tell us anything about the de facto existence of the perceived world, which could simply be illusion. However, we can be absolutely sure of our internal perception. When I hear a tone, I cannot be completely sure that there is a tone in the real world, but I am absolutely certain that I do hear. This awareness, of the fact that I hear, is called internal perception. External perception, sensory perception, can only yield hypotheses about the perceived world, but not truth. Hence he and many of his pupils (in particular Carl Stumpf and Edmund Husserl) thought that the natural sciences could only ever yield hypotheses and not universal, absolute truths as in pure logic or mathematics.

Albeit 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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