This volume brings together contributions that explore the philosophy of Franz Brentano. It looks at his work both critically and in the context of contemporary philosophy. For instance, Brentano influenced the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, the theory of objects of Alexius Meinong, the early development of the Gestalt theory, the philosophy of language of Anton Marty, the works of Carl Stumpf in the psychology of tone, and many others. Readers will also learn the contributions of Brentano's work to much debated contemporary issues in philosophy of mind, ontology, and the theory of emotions. The first section deals with Brentano’s conception of the history of philosophy. The next approaches his conception of empirical psychology from an empirical standpoint and in relation with competing views on psychology from the period. The third section discusses Brentano’s later programme of a descriptive psychology or “descriptive phenomenology” and some of his most innovative developments, for instance in the theory of emotions. The final section examines metaphysical issues and applications of his mereology. His reism takes here an important place. The intended readership of this book comprises phenomenologists, analytic philosophers, philosophers of mind and value, as well as metaphysicians. It will appeal to both graduate and undergraduate students, professors, and researchers in philosophy and psychology.

Franz Brentano’s impact on the philosophy of his time and on 20th-century philosophy is considerable. The “sharp dialectician” (Freud) and “genial master” (Husserl) influenced philosophers of various allegiances, being acknowledged not only as the “grandfather of phenomenology” (Ryle) but also as an analytic philosopher “in the best sense of this term” (Chisholm). The fourteen new essays gathered together in this volume give an insight in three core issues of Brentano’s philosophy: consciousness (sect.1), intentionality (sect. 2) and ontology and metaphysics (sect. 3). Two further sections of the volume deal with the posterity of his philoso¬phy: in section 4, the legacy of his account of sense perception and feeling is discussed, while the history of Brentano’s unpublished manuscripts is discussed in section 5. This section also presents an edition of a manuscript from 1899 on relations, along with the letters from Brentano to Marty which discuss this manuscript. The last part of section 5 contains the text of a public lecture given by Brentano on the laws of inference.

The book discusses Franz Brentano’s impact on Austrian philosophy. It contains both a critical reassessment of Brentano’s place in the development of Austrian philosophy at the turn of the 20th century and a reevaluation of the impact and significance of his philosophy of mind or ‘descriptive psychology’ which was Brentano's most important contribution to contemporary philosophy and to the philosophy in Vienna. In addition, the relation between Brentano, phenomenology, and the Vienna Circle is investigated, together with a related documentation of Brentano's disciple Alfred Kastil (in German). The general part deals with the ongoing discussion of Carnap's "Aufbau" (Vienna Circle Lecture by Alan Chalmers) and the philosophy of mind, with a focus on physicalism as discussed by Carnap and Wittgenstein (Gergely Ambrus). As usual, two reviews of recent publications in the philosophy of mathematics (Paolo Mancosu) and research on Otto Neurath's lifework (Jordi Cat/Adam Tuboly) are included as related research contributions. This book is of interest to students, historians, and philosophers dealing with the history of Austrian and German philosophy in the 19th and 20th century.

This innovative volume investigates the meaning of ‘something’ in different recent philosophical traditions in order to rethink the logic and the unity of ontology, without forgetting to compare these views to earlier significative accounts in the history of philosophy. In fact, the revival of interest in “something” in the 19th and 20th centuries as well as in contemporary philosophy can easily be accounted for: it affords the possibility for asking the question: what is there? without engaging in predefined speculative assumptions The issue about “something” seems to avoid any naive approach to the question about what there is, so that it is treated in two main contemporary philosophical trends: “material ontology”, which aims at taking “inventory” of what there is, of everything that is; and “formal ontology”, which analyses the structural features of all there is, whatever it is. The volume advances cutting-edge debates on what is the first et the most general item in ontology, that is to say “something”, because the relevant features of the conceptual core of something are: non-nothingness, otherness. Something means that one being is different from others. The relationality belongs to something.: Therefore, the volume advances cutting-edge debates in phenomenology, analytic philosophy, formal and material ontology, traditional metaphysics.

The Philosophy of Brentano has as its goal to explore the significance and impact of Franz Brentano’s thought, to promote a deepening of the ongoing renaissance of interest in Brentano, and to advance the project of understanding Brentano’s actual philosophical positions and correcting entrenched misunderstandings.

Mark Textor presents a critical study of the work of one of the most important thinkers of the 19th century. How is the mental distinct from the physical? What must awareness of seeing, hearing, etc. be like to be infallible? What does the unity of a conscious mental life consist in? Textor shows how Brentano helps us to answer these questions

Franz Brentano's classic study Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint was the most important of Brentano's works to be published in his lifetime. A new introduction by Peter Simons places Brentano's work in the context of current philosophical thought. He is able to show how Brentano has emerged since the 1970s as a key figure in both contemporary European and Anglo-American traditions and crucial to any understanding the recent history of philosophy and psychology.