| German philosopher generally regarded as the
founder of act psychology, or intentionalism, which concerns
itself with the acts of the mind rather than with the contents
of the mind. He was a nephew of the poet Clemens Brentano.
Brentano was ordained a Roman Catholic priest (1864) and
appointed Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) in philosophy
(1866) and professor (1872) at the University of Würzburg.
Religious doubts, exacerbated by the dogma of papal infallibility
(1870), led to his resignation from his post and the priesthood
(1873).
Brentano then began writing one of his best-known and most
influential works, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte
(1874; "Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint"),
in which he tried to present a systematic psychology that
would be a science of the soul.
Concerned with mental processes, or acts, he revived and
modernized the scholastic philosophical theory of "intentional
existence," or, as he called it, "immanent objectivity";
in psychical phenomena, he held, there is a "direction
of the mind to an object"--e.g., one sees something.
The object seen is said to "inexist" within the
act of seeing or to have "immanent objectivity."
He suggested that, fundamentally, the mind can refer to
objects by perception and ideation, including sensing and
imagining; by judgment, including acts of acknowledgment,
rejection, and recall; and by loving or hating, which take
into account desires, intentions, wishes, and feelings.
The ideas expressed in the Psychologie formed the credo
of his followers and became the starting point of their
work.
In 1874 Brentano was appointed professor at the University
of Vienna. His decision to marry in 1880 was blocked by
Austrian authorities, who refused to accept his resignation
from the priesthood and, considering him still a cleric,
denied him permission to marry. He was forced to resign
his professorship, and he moved with his wife to Leipzig.
The following year he was allowed to return to the University
of Vienna as a Privatdozent, and he remained there until
1895. He enjoyed wide popularity among his students, among
whom were Sigmund Freud, psychologist Carl Stumpf, philosopher
Edmund Husserl, and Tomás Masaryk, the founder of
modern Czechoslovakia. Another major work of Brentano's,
Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie ("Inquiry into
Sense Psychology"), appeared in 1907. Completing his
early masterwork was Von der Klassifikation der psychischen
Phänomene (1911; "On the Classification of Psychological
Phenomena")
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