Brentano’s Project of Philosophy as Science

By Carlo Ierna

The topic of my current research project is exactly as it says on the tin: “Philosophy as Science: the Project of the School of Brentano”. The main goal is to provide a reconstruction and reassessment of the ideal of philosophy as science as unifying project of the School of Brentano in the context of nineteenth century philosophy. As I mentioned in the previous post, commentators have argued that the school lacks unity, to the point that it is up for debate whether we should call it a school at all. I found a strong continuity and overlap in their philosophy of mathematics, so I thought that perhaps, given the vast amount of unpublished manuscripts and letters, we hadn’t looked hard enough or in the right places for unifying factors. While I carved out a somewhat obscure niche by investigating the philosophy of mathematics in the School of Brentano, with this project I went right for one of the most famous and well-known claims by Brentano (which was even selected as the motto of the Cambridge Companion to Brentano).

The ideal of philosophy as science was publicly endorsed and defended by Brentano as early as 1866 in his famous fourth habilitation thesis: “Vera philosophiae methodus nulla alia nisi scientiae naturalis est”: the true method of philosophy is none other than that of natural sciences. This claim led directly to the central questions in my project: What does this thesis mean exactly? How did it contribute to the formation of his school? What lasting effects, if any, did it have on his students? This thesis became the north star of his school and as Stumpf wrote to Brentano in 1892: “This thesis and what it implies was what rallied Marty and me to your flag.” Indeed, the renewal of philosophy as science remained a lasting concern for most of his students. Besides their various works on epistemology, logic, and philosophy of science, they also discussed the scientific status of philosophy and its relation to other sciences in programmatic works (e.g. Masaryk 1885/87 , Meinong 1885, 1907; Stumpf 1906, 1907; Husserl 1911).

Brentano kept developing his ideal as a concrete program, as he told his students: “We are taking the first steps toward the renewal of philosophy as science”, not by conjuring up “proud systems” out of thin air, but by humbly “cultivating fallow scientific ground”. Philosophy is not done by speculative construction, but by humble, detailed investigation. “There is no doubt anymore that also in philosophical matters no other teacher can be found than experience, and ... that a philosopher, like any other researcher, can only make progress in his field conquering it step by step.” Indeed, for Brentano, if we would manage to develop a method in analogy to the natural sciences, a true golden age of philosophy would lie before us. But how? How did Brentano practice what he preached?

In his 1874 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Brentano develops a framework and methodology for a scientific psychology and at the same time lays the groundwork for the project of philosophy as science. In this book Brentano famously re-introduced the concept of intentionality in philosophy: that all mental acts are directed at something or have something as content. Using intentionality as a criterion we can distinguish natural and mental phenomena, i.e. physical and psychical phenomena, or in other words, phenomena of external and internal perception. Physical phenomena would be color, tone, warmth, etc.; psychical phenomena would be the seeing of the color, the hearing of the tone, the feeling of the warmth, etc. Neither internal nor external perception shows us substances, hence psychology is not a science of the soul (understood as a substance), but the science of mental phenomena for Brentano. In the same way physics is the science of physical phenomena, and not of substantial bodies. The science of mental phenomena would then proceed in the same fashion as that of natural phenomena: perception and description of concrete cases, formulation of hypotheses, discussion based on further data, induction of increasingly general laws, deduction of increasingly specific cases, verification or falsification based on concrete experiences.

Brentano’s psychology identifies three basic classes of mental acts: presentations (Vorstellungen), judgments (Urteile) and emotions (Gemütsbewegungen). All of these are intentional acts: “there is no psychical phenomenon which is not consciousness of an object”. All mental acts would either be presentations or contain presentations in them: judgment and emotions essentially consist in a positive or negative quality added to a presentation. What is accepted or rejected in a judgment is the existence of what is presented. Perception, both internal and external, would be simply a case of judgement, where we positively accept the existence of what is given in the presentation. In this sense, internal perception is inherently superior to external perception. We can always doubt the existence of the objects of our external perception, because we cannot exclude that we fall prey to illusions or hallucinations, that we are dreaming, etc. But “[No one] can really doubt whether the mental state that he perceives in himself, actually is, and whether it is as he perceives it”. It is in large part due to this epistemic privilege of internal perception that Brentano considered his philosophical psychology to be capable of becoming an exact science. Brentano sharply distinguishes internal perception from introspection, pointing out that inner perception cannot become introspection or inner observation. We are directly conscious of our own mental acts while living through them, without the need for another separate act directed at them that would ‘observe’ them, since this would introduce an infinite regress. This might contribute to establish psychology as an exact science, but what about philosophy?

Well, the three classes of mental acts, presentations, judgements, and emotions, serve as the foundations for the philosophical disciplines of aesthetics, logic, and ethics respectively. Therefore, psychology also provides the foundational layer for philosophical research in these disciplines and strongly connecting psychology and philosophy as both involving the study of mental phenomena. Indeed, Brentano ambitiously stated that a mature scientific psychology would become the foundation for all the highest aims of mankind and would improve the further development of all sciences, also including the social sciences: “Clearly social phenomena belong among the mental phenomena, and no other knowledge can be drawn upon as ordering authority but the knowledge of psychical laws, that is, philosophical knowledge”. In fact, for Brentano psychology is “the science of the future” that can even displace Aristotle’s “architectonic” discipline, politics, which would be nothing but “applied psychology” anyway.

What emerges form this brief sketch (admittedly cherry-picking some of Brentano’s most quotable one-liners and soundbites), is a vision of a foundational disciple for all sciences, and this discipline is in its very essence a, or rather the Geisteswissenschaft. What do I mean by that? Brentano’s philosophical psychology is ultimately configured as a science of consciousness. In my next post I’ll explain in more detail what I mean with “science of consciousness” here (for more details, see my “La science de la conscience selon Brentano” and “Making the Humanities Scientific: Brentano’s Project of Philosophy as Science”).

Comments

[Sebastian Luft]

Sounds very interesting, Carlo. I would be interested in what you think about the relation to the Marburg project of a psychology 'according to critical method' (see Natorp's Einleitung in die Psychologie of 1888 and the Allgemeine Psychologie of 1912). Natorp soundly ignores Brentano in both works, which is a bit unfair, surely.

[Carlo Ierna]

Hi Sebastian, thanks for your comment! The Neo-Kantian approach is different from the get go in how they articulate the basic elements of psychology. Instead of looking at the intentionality of the act, i.e. how an act is directed at the world, Natorp immediately looks at the "I", the subjective character of the experience, in the sense that the content has a relation to an ego. At the same time, this ego is not accessible in the same way that other contents are, i.e. it cannot be objectified. For Brentano, there is a methodological unity (broadly conceived, between the natural and the mental sciences in that they both employ experience and perception (sure, internal and external, but perception nonetheless). That enables all kinds of interdisciplinarity, which the neokantians would have a lot of problems with. I'll go into the limits of Brentano's internal perception and how it can be complemented by external perception in my next post. By the way, given that Natorp was influenced by Cohen and Laas, which were students of Trendelenburg, it would be interesting to compare the reception of Aristotle in the Marburg neokantians and the School of Brentano.

[Sebastian Luft]

In MR, Plato was the big guy, while Aristotle was for the most part ignored (or seen as a Platonist). But this is a real gap in scholarship.

I'm not sure the Marburgers would have had problems with interdisciplinarity, if anything, Cassirer is a methodological pluralist.

[Carlo Ierna]

Interesting. Yet, Natorp opens his 1888 with a discussion of Aristotle. For Brentano it is precisely methodological unity that allows interdisciplinary collaboration, so there is a significant difference in their approach right there.

"Philosophy is a science like other sciences and therefore, in order to practice it correctly, it must also have a method that is in essence identical to the method of the other sciences. The natural scientific method [...], this much is clear nowadays, is also the only true one for philosophy. And only in this way she can then establish and maintain a connection with other sciences; because nowhere are the domains of knowledge that we distinguished sharply delimited, rather they all reach out into one another in a certain way" (Meine letzen Wünsche für Österreich)

Of course you can criticize the vaunted universality of the "empirical method" that he advocates, but it certainly seems the fulcrum of his philosophy of science. He would not object to a plurality in techniques (experimental, observational, historical, etc.) as long as they are all based on experience. The odd one out here is of course mathematics ...

[Sebastian Luft]

Right, the (Neo-)Kantians would never agree to this, it would be a thoroughgoing naturalism, to them.

This is Marburg:

All sciences have to be conducted "logically," i.e., according to critical method (= the transcendental method). The odd one out is psychology, because in order to access this sphere, I have to objectify it = kill subjectivity. This is supposedly solved by the method of "reconstruction," which is the inverse of construction, but as critics have pointed out (Husserl but also Heidegger), this adds nothing and doesn't solve the problem, so Natorp's project is doomed--as he himself acknowledged (tacitly) in his late years.

All of this is detailed in my forthcoming book...

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Carlo: Interesting stuff!

I definitely like Brentano's overall methodological ideal: that philosophy should be based on careful empirical investigation, rather than mere speculation.

However, I can't help but wonder, from the rest of your exposition, how well he hewed to the ideal himself. He seems to impute a great deal of certainty to introspection (viz. “there is no psychical phenomenon which is not consciousness of an object"). Yet, there's a lot of empirical evidence that introspection is highly fallible, and often illusory (see e.g. http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Naive.htm ).

How do you think these concerns apply to Brenanto's philosophy of science? Perhaps you intend to address this in a future post, but I couldn't help but ask! :)

[Carlo Ierna]

Hi Marcus, thanks for your comment! Brentano dedicates various paragraphs of his 1874 Psychology to the distinction between introspection and inner perception. Inner perception is the immediate awareness of every mental act given in and with that act itself, while introspection or inner observation would be a separate, secondary act. "If someone is in a state in which he wants to observe his own anger ranging within him, the anger must already be somewhat diminished, and so his original object of observation would have disappeared. The same impossibility is also present in all other cases. It is a universally valid psychological law that we can never focus our attention upon the object of inner perception.’’ (Brentano 1874, 36). On the next page Brentano points out that introspection doesn't lead to anything but a headache ... However, he likewise criticises the opponents of introspectionism that think we should also reject inner perception, because they confise the two (39). As I will point out in my next post, Brentano recognizes the limits of inner perception and broadens the sources of knowledge in psychology considerably.