Brentano, Franz

Brentano, Franz (fränts brĕntä`nō), 1838–1917, German philosopher and psychologist. He was a teacher (1866–73) at Würzburg, and in 1874 he became professor of philosophy at Vienna. In 1880 he retired to write and study. His best-known book, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (1874), attempts to establish psychology as an independent science. Brentano believed that mental processes were the data of psychology and were to be regarded as acts rather than as passive processes. He influenced Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong.

Bibliography

See studies by G. Bergmann (1967), A. C. Rancurello (1968), and R. M. Chisholm (1986).

---

Brentano, Franz (Clemens)

(born Jan. 16, 1838, Marienberg, Hesse-Nassau—died March 17, 1917, Zürich, Switz.) German philosopher. Nephew of Clemens Brentano, he was ordained a priest in 1864 and taught at the University of Würzburg (1866–73). Religious doubts led to his resignation from the priesthood in 1873. To present a systematic psychology that would serve as a science of the soul, he wrote the influential Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). He became the founder of act psychology, or intentionalism, which concerns itself with the mind's “acts” or processes (e.g., perception, judgment, loving, and hating) rather than its contents. He later taught at the University of Vienna (1874–80, 1881–95) and published works such as Inquiry into Sense Psychology (1907) and The Classification of Psychological Phenomena (1911).