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a strong continuity and overlap in their philosophy of mathematics, so I thought that perhaps, given the vast amount of unpublished manuscripts and letters, we hadn’t looked hard enough or in the right places for unifying factors.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”).
Leave a Reply