By Carlo Ierna
First of all, I’d like to thank Marcus Arvan for this wonderful opportunity to present and discuss my research on the Philosopher’s Cocoon. I think I might be stretching the definition of “Early Career Researcher” a bit, but since I am still an untenured postdoc, I guess it is fitting enough. Thematically I focus on areas that are generally considered as part of the “core” of analytical philosophy: philosophy of logic and mathematics, philosophy of science and epistemology, and nowadays increasingly metaphysics and philosophy of mind. However, my work in philosophy has been mainly historical, concentrating on the School of Brentano and the 19th/early 20th century more in general. I’ll structure my posts here around the way I have approached these three broad themes.
The School of Brentano is probably not as well known as it should be, as you might expect me to say. “19th century philosophy” more often evokes German Idealism, Neokantianism, or Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion”: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Perhaps in the US it also might be more closely tied to American Pragmatism or even the Transcendalists. I have the impression that there is often a gap in the mainstream discussion between Hegel’s death (1831) and the publication of Frege’s Begriffsschrift (1879), which is often regarded as having kicked off analytic philosophy (as Quine quipped “Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one”). Hence, my favourite authors are more often than not considered as minor or marginal (with the exception of Husserl). Still, I would argue that Franz Brentano is the most important author you quite probably have never heard of! Perhaps the most visible contribution is his re-introduction of the concept of intentionality. But this was certainly not the only contribution he or his School have made. Brentano strongly argued for the ideal of doing philosophy as science (I will say more about that in a future post). He even claimed that “the true method of philosophy is none other than that of the natural sciences”. Brentano instilled in his students a strong sense of scientific rigor and encouraged what we would now consider interdisciplinary research into the mind and consciousness (also more about this in another post). While Brentano unfortunately failed to secure funding for a psychological laboratory (which would have anticipated Wilhelm Wundt’s by 5 years), his students did succeed and spread his theories far and wide, holding important chairs in philosophy at major universities throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire and central Europe. Carl Stumpf, Brentano’s first student, taught at the universities of Göttingen, Würzburg, Prague, Halle, Munich and finally settled in Berlin, where he established a psychological laboratory and a phonogram archive, founding the Berlin School of Gestalt Psychology, influencing, among others, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. Anton Marty spread Brentano’s philosophy for more than three decades in Prague, raising the second generation of Brentanists, among others Alfred Kastil and Oskar Kraus, and exerting a significant influence on the development of Prague Linguistics, since Vilem Mathesius studied with him and Roman Jacobson read his works already before coming to Prague. Alexius Meinong became professor in Graz, where he established the first psychological laboratory in Austria and founded the Graz School of Gestalt psychology, including Stephan Witasek and Vittorio Benussi. Edmund Husserl’s works gave rise to the phenomenological movement, which inspired much of what is now called “continental philosophy”. In various ways he influenced existentialism, hermeneutics and French philosophy: Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Alexandre Koyré, Jan Patocka, and Edith Stein, among many others. Kazimierz Twardowski moved back to his homeland Poland, establishing the first Polish psychological laboratory there, and became the father of Polish Philosophy, propagating Brentanist ideas as the teacher of Tadeusz Kotarbinski, Jan Lukasiewicz, Stanislaw Lesniewski, and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. Finally, Christian von Ehrenfels is still best known for his seminal article “Über ‘Gestaltqualitäten’” (1890), which contributed to establishing and shaping Gestalt psychology. Other notable figures that studied under Brentano include Thomas Masaryk, Sigmund Freud, and Rudolf Steiner.
Interestingly enough, the School of Brentano also had strong ties with the early analytics. Indeed, Frege’s works were prominently discussed and commented upon by the Brentanists. E.g. he is the most quoted author in Husserl’s first book, the 1891 Philosophy of Arithmetic (see my “Husserl’s Psychology of Arithmetic”, where I also refute the stubborn misconception that Frege would have converted Husserl to anti-psychologism with his 1894 review). Likewise, the famous concept ‘horse’ problem developed in discussion with the Brentanist Benno Kerry (see e.g. Ian Proops "What is Frege's "Concept horse Problem" ?"). Moreover, the inspiration to explain the fundamental ideas of his Begriffsschrift in ordinary language in his 1884 Grundlagen came from Stumpf (see Frege’s Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, p. 172). Through the mediation of Stout’s Analytical Psychology, Brentano’s ideas were made available to Russell and Moore (see Van der Schaar “From analytic psychology to analytic philosophy: The reception of Twardowski's ideas in Cambridge” and more recently G.F. Stout and the Psychological Origins of Analytic Philosophy, or the much more forceful argument by David Bell “The Revolution of Moore and Russell: A Very British Coup?”). Russell and Moore engaged repeatedly with members of the School. Consider the debates between Russell and Meinong (see e.g. Janet Smith “The Russell-meinong debate” or the more recent contributions to Griffin & Jacquette’s Russell Vs. Meinong: The Legacy of “on Denoting”). Furthermore, we can find a particularly positive instance in Moore’s review of Brentano’s work on ethics: “This is a far better discussion of the most fundamental principles of Ethics than any others with which I am acquainted. Brentano himself is fully conscious that he has made a very great advance in the theory of Ethics. ... In almost all points in which he differs from any of the great historical systems, he is in the right; and he differs with regard to the most fundamental points of Moral Philosophy. ... It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of his work.”. There are plenty more examples to give here, including curious anticipations of analytical ideas, such as the “Twin Earth” thought experiment, which Husserl proposed in 1911, or the theory of speech acts, developed in detail by Husserl’s student Adolf Reinach in 1913. Perhaps I should just close with the obligatory reference to Ryle’s legendary lectures on Bolzano, Brentano, Husserl and Meinong, afterwards known in Oxford as “Ryle’s three Austrian railway stations and one Chinese game of chance” (see his 1970 autobiography).
I was first drawn to Husserl and the School of Brentano as an undergrad through my teacher Karl Schuhmann at Utrecht University, who managed to hold a full course just on Husserl’s 1894 treatise on “Intentional Objects”. The first text I studied independently was Husserl’s first book, the 1891 Philosophy of Arithmetic, specifically the section on infinity for a guest class by Richard Tieszen (which partially ended up in my “Husserl and the Infinite”). I wrote my MA thesis with Schuhmann on the Brentanian background of Husserl’s early philosophy of mathematics (in German, which then partially ended up in my “The Beginnings of Husserl’s Philosophy”, Part 1 and Part 2. Together with other materials I have now reworked these into a book). This ultimately led me to the topic of my first postdoc on the philosophy of mathematics in the School of Brentano, which will be the focus of my next post.
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