Reply to Professor Chisholm

Abstract

As often before in our conversations, discussions and cooperation (as coeditors of a volume of Brentano’s writings), Professor Chisholm has forced me to rethink and to clarify my position on an important philosophical issue. And as always, I am deeply grateful for his efforts. Chisholm finds an apparent inconsistency between on the one hand my rejection of Descarte’ method on the ground that it is intended to provide a criterion of “absolutely certain ‘truths of fact’” and on the other hand my “description of the general nature of psychological phenomena”. For, Chisholm argues, this description is not only, as we both agree, indebted to Brentano’s psychology but is — or could in the spirit of that psychology be — expressed by absolutely certain factual propositions.