Abstract
In this chapter, the author raises new objections to the self-representational reading of Brentano. This reading, he argues, is untenable simply because Brentano regards a representational perception as conceptually impossible. He then provides a new construal of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, based on a phenomenological approach to intentionality and consciousness. In his view, the main purpose of Brentano’s theory of intentionality is to account for mental acts that are not (inner) perceptions, that is, for acts in which something appears without existing.
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Notes
- 1.
This suggests a significant distinction between Brentano’s presentations and the British empiricists’ “ideas” (Crane 2017, 45). See also (Stout 1896, 41): “Brentano’s ‘object’ is the same as Kant’s ‘presentation’. It is an appearance in consciousness. It is what Brentano would call a content (Inhalt) of presentation.”
- 2.
Brentano’s view of inner perception, thus construed, may in some ways seem close to Russell’s view of acquaintance. As opposed to knowledge by description, acquaintance by definition requires an object that really exists (Russell 1992, 48ff.). In what follows, I suggest that Brentano’s presentism leads to an even stronger view, namely: For all x, x really exists if, and only if, x is perceived. Another significant difference is that Brentano’s oblique mode is not restricted to conceptual thoughts and thus allows for a nonconceptualist account of intentionality.
- 3.
“Someone who is thinking of a mental activity is, in a certain way, thinking of two objects at the same time, one of them in recto, as it were, and the other in obliquo. If I think of someone who loves flowers, then the person who loves flowers is the object I am thinking of in recto, but the flowers are what I am thinking of in obliquo.” (Brentano 1925, 134, Engl. trans. 272–273) The view that the mental act has a part that is really distinct from it is problematic. Brentano distinguishes between the intentional object as the content of the act and the intentional object as its correlate.
- 4.
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Seron, D. (2020). Consciousness and Representation. In: Fisette, D., Fréchette, G., Janoušek, H. (eds) Franz Brentano’s Philosophy After One Hundred Years. Primary Sources in Phenomenology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48563-4_3
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