Presentative Character of Intentionality in Franz Brentano

Authors: Claudio R and Claudio R

DOI: 10.23880/phij-16000266

Volume 5, Issue 3

Abstract

The article aims to explain an absolutely central or even founding aspect of the entire speculative framework of Brentano’s thought: the primarily presentative character of consciousness or, more specifically, of the intentionality of acts of consciousness. As is well known, the sphere of mental phenomena is divided by Brentano into three different fields, that relating to acts of representation (Vorstellung), of judgement and so-called acts of sentiment. This tri-partition is however interconnected with the absolutely unique and fundamental role that Brentano assigns to the phenomenon of Vorstellung, which, for reasons that will be explained in the article, is better to translate with the term “presentation”. According to Brentano, psychic phenomena are either presentations or are based on presentations, so that at the basis of any psychic phenomenon - that is, of any act of consciousness - there is always a presentation of something. In the text it will be explained how it is precisely at this level that the foundation of intentionality resides, which in Brentano’s view constitutes that character which more than any other qualifies mental phenomena. Relevant conclusions from this conception of intentionality of the consciousness will be highlighted in the text: the fundamentally neutral character of presentational intentionality, as well as the primacy of the object in the structuring of it. This interpretation of the intentionality has its capital point in the rigorous distinction between psychic phenomena and the physical ones, so that according to Brentano on the mental level everything is strictly psychic. The article will attempt to highlight this distinction with reference to Brentano’s decisive detachment from the orientations of experimental or genetic psychology prior to him that tended towards a reductionist position of mental processes to those of a physiological nature: the objective content of the conscience is referred to the object itself and not the result of a sort of physiological causality.

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