Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Brentano

Franz Brentano (1838–1917) was an Austrian philosopher and psychologist who held chairs at Würzburg and Vienna, trained Husserl and Meinong among others, and set the terms for virtually everything that followed in the philosophy of mind. His 1874 Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint contains the idea that has proven indestructible: every mental state is directed toward an object. He called this intentionality, and he called it the mark of the mental. Whether or not you accept his way of developing the idea — and the book does not, entirely — the thesis itself is one of those insights that turn out to be more correct than their author realized.

Major Works

  • Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) — intentionality as the mark of the mental; the founding text of act psychology
  • On the Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (1889) — moral philosophy grounded in intentional attitudes
  • Descriptive Psychology (1982, posthumous) — further development of the classification of mental phenomena

Key Positions

Intentionality as the mark of the mental. Brentano’s central thesis: every mental phenomenon — perceiving, thinking, believing, desiring, fearing — exhibits intentionality, the property of being directed toward an object. Physical phenomena, by contrast, do not point beyond themselves. The redness of the apple is just there; the perception of the redness points toward the apple. This directedness is what makes mental phenomena mental. Later debates about whether all mental states are intentional (what about moods? pains?) or whether some non-mental states are intentional (thermostats? viruses?) take Brentano’s claim as their starting point.

Intentional inexistence. Brentano introduced the phrase intentional inexistence to describe the way mental states involve their objects: the object “inexists” — exists within — the act. This was not a claim that mental objects fail to exist, but rather that they have a distinctive mode of existence as immanent to the mental act. The tree I perceive is present to consciousness in a way that ordinary material presence is not. This formulation, unfortunately, invited a reading on which the object of perception is always an inner mental item — a reading that subsequent philosophy has had to laboriously undo.

The classification of mental phenomena. Brentano classified mental phenomena into three fundamental classes: presentations (Vorstellungen, the basic acts of taking something as an object), judgments (acts of affirming or denying something about an object), and phenomena of love and hate (the basic evaluative attitudes). Everything mental reduces to one of these. The classification influenced Husserl’s phenomenology and, indirectly, the taxonomy of propositional attitudes in contemporary analytic philosophy.

Act psychology. Mental states, on Brentano’s view, are acts — things a mind does — rather than contents — things a mind has. This emphasis on the active, dynamic character of mental life runs against the empiricist tradition of minds as passive containers of ideas, and it connects to the broader claim that mental states are inherently directed rather than self-contained.

My View

Brentano is where the book’s story begins, whether or not he appears early in the text. The intentionality thesis is right: minds are distinctive in reaching beyond themselves, in pointing toward a world. What matters about mentality is not what it contains but what it engages. That foundational insight earns Brentano a permanent place in any serious philosophy of mind.

The difficulty is the immanent-object reading. Brentano’s language of intentional inexistence — the object existing within the act — naturally generates the picture of a mind that carries around a private theater of inner objects, a mental replica of the world enclosed in consciousness. This is exactly the picture the book dismantles. Harman’s transparency argument, the Tye/Dretske identity claim, Austin’s demolition of sense-datum theory — all of these can be read as the sustained effort to honor Brentano’s intentionality insight while rejecting the immanent-object reading.

Contemporary research makes this correction explicit: Brentano’s core insight (directedness is the mark of the mental) survives; his ontology of immanent objects does not. The object of perception is the world, not a mental surrogate. This is precisely the move from Brentano’s act psychology to a properly externalist intentionalism. See Intentionality and Mark of the Mental.

  • Intentionality — Brentano’s thesis, the book’s starting point
  • Mark of the Mental — directedness as the defining feature of mind
  • Inner Theater — the immanent-object reading; the picture the book dismantles
  • Transparency — the argument that corrects Brentano’s immanent-object framing