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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. He is best known for his views on intentionality, which could simplistically be called 'aboutness', the relationship between mental acts and the external world. Since every mental act has a content, also called its intentional object, 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.

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, tI 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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