BRENTANO’S RECOVERY OF THE INTENTIONAL

The topic of “intentionality” is a well-known quagmire. There seems to be no doubt that the Scholastic intentio had fallen into disuse in modern philosophy until it was recovered by Franz Brentano in an arresting way in the original edition (1874) of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. There, Brentano recovers intentionality - or, adhering to the text, “intentional inexistence” - as the essential nerve of an empirical psychology centered on describing the various kinds of “presentations [Vorstellungen] and other activities which are based upon presentations and which, like presentations, are only perceivable through inner perception.” These activities, Brentano says, belong to their “substantial bearer,” the soul (in Aristotle's sense of a certain “form of life” [physis, morphé], which Brentano follows), “the subject of consciousness” (as Oskar Kraus adds, without prejudging whether it is “spiritual or material” in being a “substantial substrate”).