Abstract
Franz Brentano’s criticism of Mach in his lectures on Positivism (1893–1894)
This paper is mainly about Brentano’s commentaries on Ernst Mach in his lectures “Contemporary philosophical questions” which he held one year before he left Austria. I will first identify the main sources of Brentano’s early interests in positivism during his Würzburg period. The second section provides a short overview of Brentano’s 1893–1894 lectures and his criticism of Comte, Kirchhoff, and Mill. The next sections bear on Brentano’s criticism of Mach’s monism and Brentano’s argument, based on his theory of intentionality, against the identification of mental to physical phenomena. The last section is about Brentano’s proposal to replace the identity relation in Mach’s theory of elements by that of intentional correlation. I conclude with a remark on the history of philosophy in Austria.
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Notes
- 1.
Moreover, in the summer of 1872, Brentano made a trip to England in order to meet J. Stuart Mill and several British philosophers. Unfortunately, this encounter with J. S. Mill never took place, but we know that he met H. Spencer and several influential British philosophers (Fisette 2018).
- 2.
- 3.
In his Psychology, Brentano refers to Mill’s doctrine in relation to his definition of natural sciences as a science of physical phenomena, and proposed a definition of the object of natural sciences along Comtian lines; in this context, he compares his concept of force to Mill’s permanent possibilities of sensation (2009, p. 76).
- 4.
The young Husserl was also very much interested in Mach and he reviewed Mach’s 1893 paper on the principle of comparaison in physics. (see Fisette 2012).
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Fisette, D. (2019). Brentano’s Lectures on Positivism (1893–1894) and His Relationship to Ernst Mach. In: Stadler, F. (eds) Ernst Mach – Life, Work, Influence. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04378-0_3
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