BRENTANO'S CONCEPT OF INTENTIONAL INEXISTENCE

Abstract

Franz Brentano's attempt to distinguish mental from physical phenomena by employing the scholastic concept of "intentional inexistence" is often cited as reintroducing the concept of intentionality into mainstream philosophical discussion. But Brentano's own claims about intentional inexistence are much misunderstood. In the second half of the 20th century, analytical philosophers in particular have misread Brentano's views in misleading ways.1It is important to correct these misunderstandings if we are to come to a proper assessment of Brentano's worth as a philosopher and his position in the history of philosophy. Good corrections have been made in the recent analytic literature by David Bell (1990), Dermot Moran (1996), and Barry Smith (1994) among others. But there is also another, more purely philosophical lesson to be learned from the proper understanding of Brentano's views on this matter. This is that Brentano's struggles with the concept of intentionality reveal a fundamental division between different ways of thinking about intentionality, an division which Brentano himself does not make fully clear. Making the nature of this division explicit is the aim of this paper. First I will attempt to expound Brentano's concept of intentional inexistence in its original 1874 context. This will enable us to eliminate some of the relatively superficial misunderstandings alluded to above. Then I will outline Brentano's change of mind when he later came to write the appendices to his 1874 Psychology. Although any reasonably careful reading of the text will show that Brentano did in fact change his mind, it is not always clearly recognised in the discussions of Brentano's thesis what it is that he changed it "from". Third I will show how the tension between his earlier view and the later view of the appendices is in fact the tension which is responsible for the problem of intentionality as we have it today